Re: [Usability] Re: Proposal + RFC: Improving the Bugzilla layout

[Elijah Newren <newren math utah edu>]

On Sun, 2004-03-14 at 21:33, James Henstridge wrote:
> On 14/03/2004 7:12 AM, Elijah Newren wrote:
> 
> >I would really like to have a Google-like search interface here.  Just a
> >simple box where the user can type in a bunch of terms (e.g. the product
> >name and an error message) and bugzilla launches its search.  Also, note
> >the link to http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=36557&cid=3935217 from
> >http://bugzilla-test.gnome.org/gnome-docs/TODO.docs .  Maybe info like
> >this could be put in an How-to-improve-your-search (while using the
> >simple interface) kind of page.
> >  
> >
> The input field on the front page in new versions of bugzilla is pretty 
> much equivalent to a google search box.
>
> You can enter:
> 
>     * a bug number
>     * some words, which get searched for in bug summaries
>     * use product:... as a search term to limit the search to that
>       product (you can do similar for other fields)

Yes, I am aware of this.  That was the whole reason for me including the
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=36557&cid=3935217 link which
explained this and more.  The problems are that:
  1) It's somewhere on the front page that is far removed from querying
     (I'd like either a simple-query-cgi script that had this textbox,
     or else have the textbox at the top of the query.cgi page with a
     separator and something to delimit the rest of that page as an
     "Advanced Search")
  2) I don't like the "product:..." thingy.  We'd have to explain that
     to users which would either clutter the interface or be hard to
     discover.  We should parse the search terms and determine whether
     any of them are product/component names.
  3) Searching just the summaries is sometimes suboptimal--searching
     the comments would be better.  Yes, I understand that this is
     very disk/CPU intensive.  No, I don't know what the appropriate
     solution is.  (One idea is to allow a "Search all comments instead
     of just summaries" togglebutton that defaults to off)

Elijah