= Fast flexible search =

Search should be fast and flexible.

'''As a ''' Technical Architect<<BR>>
'''I want ''' the infrastructure to support all the following stories<<BR>>
'''so that ''' I can focus on other interesting things<<BR>>

'''As a ''' Developer<<BR>>
'''I want ''' Users to be presented with duplicate bugs reliably<<BR>>
'''so that ''' only unique bugs are filed<<BR>>

'''As a ''' Developer<<BR>>
'''I want ''' to find bugs reported by my awesome testing team<<BR>>
'''so that ''' I am reviewing higher quality bugs<<BR>>

'''As a ''' Developer or Triager<<BR>>
'''I want ''' to find out about similar bugs to the closed one I am viewing<<BR>>
'''so that ''' I can clean-up duplicate bug reports<<BR>>

'''As a ''' User<<BR>>
'''I want ''' to find the project ''launchpad'' easily<<BR>>
'''so that ''' I can read about it.<<BR>>

'''As a ''' translator<<BR>>
'''I want ''' to find other translations to my language of the template<<BR>>
'''so that ''' I can reuse them.<<BR>>

'''As a ''' translator<<BR>>
'''I want ''' to find an untranslated (English) text I've seen in the UI<<BR>>
'''so that ''' I can translate it.<<BR>>

'''As a ''' translator<<BR>>
'''I want ''' to find a badly translated text (a translation) I've seen in the UI<<BR>>
'''so that ''' I can fix the translation.<<BR>>

'''As a ''' translator<<BR>>
'''I want ''' to find a translation page for one particular program I use<<BR>>
'''so that ''' I can improve/provide the translation.<<BR>>

'''As a ''' translator<<BR>>
'''I want ''' to find translations for similar English texts to the translation I am providing<<BR>>
'''so that ''' I can better reuse existing work.<<BR>>

'''A a''' user or new distribution developer<<BR>>
'''I want ''' to be able to find the DSP page for a package when I maybe just know the binary package name<<BR>>
'''so that ''' I can use all the information on that page.<<BR>>

'''As a''' developer '''I want to''' easily search both open and closed bugs '''so that I can''' quickly tell a user their bug is already fixed.

'''As a''' project manager '''I want to''' search for a tag across projects '''so that I can''' deal with systems spanning multiple codebases.


As a Launchpad hacker<<BR>>
I want to be able to find all of our bugs that also affect Bazaar but not the loom plugin<<BR>>
So that I can improve Launchpad / Bazaar integration without worrying about crappy plugins.<<BR>>

'''As an ''' upstream project maintainer<<BR>>
I want to be able to quickly access previous searches that I've done<<BR>>
Because I am a complicated person<<BR>>

As a Launchpad hacker<<BR>>
I want to search for all of the bugs tagged "sshserver" that are not owned by anyone and not tagged "hard"<<BR>>
So that I can do some opportunisitic hacking<<BR>>

As an upstream project maintainer<<BR>>
I want to be able to search for an error string in the bugs & questions in my project and in all of its dependencies (both the original projects & their packages)<<BR>>
So that I can figure out what the hell is going on<<BR>>

Use cases for searching bug reports specifically are recorded [[https://dev.launchpad.net/SearchingBugs#Use%20cases|in a previous overview specification]] — including boolean operators, advanced operators, phrase searches, bug number disambigutation, and spelling and punctuation canonicalization.

''PLEASE ADD MORE STORIES''

This feature is not about tweaking our UI. It is about clarifying what we want to be able to do with search, so that an overhaul of the search core selects a thing with a good fit to our needs.

== Rationale ==

Search is timing out, and fixing it is hard when we don't know what we actually want it to do.

We are doing it now because search is timing out and timing out gives a terrible experience to users.

This will eliminate most-or-all search related timeouts.

== Stakeholders ==

As this is about the guts of the system, the stakeholders are the developers of launchpad that want to offer features to users.

== Constraints and Requirements ==

=== Must ===

''What MUST the new behaviour provide?''

=== Nice to have ===

=== Must not ===

''What MUST it not do?''

== Subfeatures ==

''Other LaunchpadEnhancementProposal``s that form a part of this one.''

== Workflows ==

''What are the workflows for this feature?'' 
''Provide mockups for each workflow.''

'''''You do not have to get the mockups and workflows right at this point. In fact, it is better to have several alternatives, delaying deciding on the final set of workflows until the last responsible moment.'''''

== Success ==

We will know we are done when we have a set of stories we can distill into requirements for evaluating our current search implementation and other candidate implementations.


== Thoughts? ==

We have two search engines - google and tsearch2; google can't do private objects, and neither are all that good at doing what we need for e.g. duplicate bug detection. 

We also pay index costs in-transaction, which makes insertions of e.g. bug comments into the system slower. An out of transaction system (e.g. tsearch2 still, or lucene, or *** new shiny) can decrease page times for bug comments and the like.