FS#43792 - [AUR] Fuzzier name-based searching for AUR packages.

Attached to Project: AUR web interface
Opened by Brett Cornwall (ainola) - Wednesday, 11 February 2015, 22:15 GMT
Last edited by Lukas Fleischer (lfleischer) - Saturday, 27 June 2015, 18:28 GMT
Task Type Feature Request
Category Backend
Status Closed
Assigned To Lukas Fleischer (lfleischer)
Architecture All
Severity Low
Priority Normal
Reported Version 3.5.0
Due in Version 4.0.0
Due Date Undecided
Percent Complete 100%
Votes 1
Private No

Details

Using the web interface to search for a package can be quite painful: If one searches for a program with spaces in the name, that program will often not show up. The reason is often due to the hyphenization of the package names. For instance, searching for "hotline miami" brings up no results even though there are two packages that it should return: 'hotlinemiami' and 'hotline-miami-gog'. So then one must awkwardly pick and choose what search terms to use to get a useful result. A fuzzier search match would be very beneficial.

Using pacaur to search brings back expected results.

This has led me to put package names in descriptions of some packages because they'd be difficult to search for otherwise.
This task depends upon

Closed by  Lukas Fleischer (lfleischer)
Saturday, 27 June 2015, 18:28 GMT
Reason for closing:  Deferred
Comment by Lukas Fleischer (lfleischer) - Monday, 23 February 2015, 09:03 GMT
Sounds like a good idea. Maybe an option to run a SOUNDEX-based search?
Comment by Marti (intgr) - Monday, 08 June 2015, 12:22 GMT
In my experience, trigram-similarity searches are very useful for such fuzzy matching. Not sure if it can be implemented easily using MySQL.

SOUNDEX is not very useful, it has tons of false positives.
Comment by Lukas Fleischer (lfleischer) - Monday, 08 June 2015, 12:33 GMT
AUR 4.0.0 uses keyword search. Searching for "hotline miami" should now return "hotlinemiami". Not really "fuzzy" but much better than what we had before.
Comment by Brett Cornwall (ainola) - Tuesday, 09 June 2015, 04:20 GMT
it's still a bit awkward. "technic launcher" should return minecraft-technic-launcher and gets nothing; "battle cube" should return battle-cube with the same result. I can't test hotlinemiami as it hasn't been migrated over to AUR4 yet. :)
Comment by Lukas Fleischer (lfleischer) - Tuesday, 09 June 2015, 06:24 GMT
Works for me [1, 2].

[1] https://aur4.archlinux.org/packages/?O=0&K=technic+launcher
[2] https://aur4.archlinux.org/packages/?O=0&K=battle+cube
Comment by Brett Cornwall (ainola) - Tuesday, 09 June 2015, 06:27 GMT
Well, that's embarrassing. It does work. I must have accidentally used the regular AUR. :(
Comment by Lukas Fleischer (lfleischer) - Saturday, 27 June 2015, 18:28 GMT
I think we can keep it as-is for now. The new keyword search covers everything you brought up in the initial description. Please reopen if you think that a real "fuzzy" search is needed.

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