topic search

Stream: Zulip meta

[Tsvi Benson-Tilsen]

(This is an issue with Zulip, which I'm new to.) I tried searching for stuff about "equality of structures" in the big prominent search bar at the top of the page. This basically returned nothing. So I wrote out a long-ish question, and when I went to make a new topic, typing "Equalit..." gave some names that sounded like my question. It took me a frustrating few minutes to find these topics, even though I knew their names. AFAICT the ways are: type "topic:EXACTNAME" in the search bar; or, in the sidebar, click on "more topic" below a stream, then search in the bar that pops up. I think this is causing people to ask the same question over and over; there's >2 topics already created to ask the same question I was about to create another topic for. Not sure what to do about this. If the welcome bot gave instructions like "to find people asking a similar question, do X", that might help people.

[Johan Commelin]

@Tsvi Benson-Tilsen Very good point. I'm running into the same issue. I've sort of learned to live with it. But it's something that we should report to the Zulip devs.

[Johan Commelin]

The "more topics" -> search in the bar that pops up strategy works well. But it's hard to discover. It would be great of the big search bar at the top could have topic:not-very-exact-name or something like that.

[Kevin Buzzard]

Related: I asked a question recently and when I was making the topic title Zulip suggested a title which looked perfect and which presumably already exists. But then I couldn't figure out how to read just that precise topic; search gave me far too much and it turned out that the discussion I wanted happened in 2019. Did I miss a trick?

[Alex J. Best]

I sometimes resort to Google "site:" search on the chat archive, it can be more effective than the Zulip search sometimes.

[Alya Abbott]

Kevin Buzzard said:

Related: I asked a question recently and when I was making the topic title Zulip suggested a title which looked perfect and which presumably already exists. But then I couldn't figure out how to read just that precise topic; search gave me far too much and it turned out that the discussion I wanted happened in 2019. Did I miss a trick?

I think there are additional issues with search being raised here, but to answer this one: you can use the CTRL/CMD + . shortcut to narrow to the current compose box recipient. So if the topic auto-complete suggests a topic you think might be relevant, you can choose it from the auto-complete and then use the shortcut to navigate to it.

[Johan Commelin]

@Alya Abbott Thank you so much. Definitely going to use that in the future.

[Johan Commelin]

I understand that one of the design goals is to have an uncluttered UI. But do you think there could also be a button that shows this "Narrow to topic"?

[Alya Abbott]

Yeah, we had a student working on that feature over the summer, but it didn't quite get finished. I bumped the discussion thread and he just updated the pull request (https://github.com/zulip/zulip/pull/19590), so hopefully we can get it polished up and merged.

[Alya Abbott]

@Tsvi Benson-Tilsen 's message above revealed a search bug that surfaces when there is a very large number of topics, which should be fixed shortly (https://github.com/zulip/zulip/pull/20942). Thanks for providing all the details, which let us replicate it and track down what's going on!