Search Relevance Tweaks

Search Terms

Search, Relevance, Lunr

Problem

My colleagues and I have spent the last few weeks rigging up TypeDoc on our TypeScript library. For the most part it works beautifully and we’re astonished how well this project works out of the box, but we’ve been having some trouble with a few quirks in the search feature:

• exact matches don’t seem to get a boost in relevance. We have a class called “Button”, but when we search for “button”, the main result we’re interested in gets muscled down to the 53rd slot by other minor results that have “button” in their name (eg. “Foo.primaryButton”),
• there’s no way to adjust the number of search results, and no “View all” option
• classes don’t seem to get a boost over props and other minor features
• there’s no way to boost on things like categories

I understand that not everyone wants search to work the same way, so I thought this might be a good candidate for a plugin, but once I looked into it I realized that plugins seem to have more to do with reflection than runtime adjustments like this.

So, before we dive in and start preparing a PR, I thought I’d see if you folks can provide any insight or background.

Suggested Solution

Off the top of my head, I would like to see some kind of search configuration on typedoc.json. Maybe something like this:

{
  ...
  "search": {
    "maxResults": 10,
    "weights": {
     "isClass": 1.1,
     "exactMatch": 2.1,
     "byCategory": {
        "component": 3.4,
        "coreComponent": 4
      }
    }
  }
}

Thoughts?

[Gerrit0]

The defaultValue is the way to go I think, with the default boosts documented on the website. gzip ought to take care of the extra bloat, so I don’t think that’s much of an issue

[Gerrit0]

Going to go ahead and close this, PR welcome if you (or anyone) would like to propose some defaults, but just having exact matches boosted does pretty well.