Searching for applications

[Dylan McCall <dylanmccall gmail com>]

We're all moving towards searching for applications. Gnome Shell,
Unity and KDE's desktop all promote it. However, I have yet to see a
solid implementation.

The Desktop Entry Specification gives us a Name, a Comment and a list
of Categories. Right now, the search system in Gnome Shell appears to
use the first two of those fields. Nothing seems to do stemming.
If I search for “photo,” I get Shotwell, Cheese, F-Spot and Gimp.
If I search for “photos,” I get Cheese, F-Spot and Shotwell.
And if I search for “camera,” I get UFRaw.

This is not good. People frequently use search for discovering stuff,
even when they don't know what that stuff is called. Actually, I would
bet people expect it at this point. Just having a Search box in Gnome
Shell suggests that is the case, but it does not provide for
application discovery because its results are so finicky.

One solution is a standard field for Keywords, which could make a bit
of sense. The really dumb thing now is application developers write
their comments not to be helpful, but to fit as many searchable key
words as they possible can. Keywords would fix that, so the Comment
field could actually be used sensibly again. Unfortunately, that
solution still keeps us with different applications describing
themselves differently. F-Spot might have a “camera” keyword while
Cheese may have “webcam.” Repeat for each locale. Pretty high
maintenance.

The categories in the desktop entry spec aren't bad. They have to be
kept up to date (new types of apps may not have categories), but that
isn't a disaster. F-Spot has “Graphics;Photography;GNOME;GTK;”. So,
maybe this can be improved by populating search using the categories.
Note that this can't be a direct one-to-one thing, especially because
lots of categories have camel case names, like ContactManagement.
Instead, maybe a particular category should map to a set of synonyms
that are maintained somewhere central.

That's my thought for the day. I'm happy to give that heap of category
synonyms a shot if there is some interest; it seems to fit with the
artsy stuff I find myself doing these days :)


Dylan