We’re in the early stages of doing a pretty significant update to the Search feature on Glitch (we know this has been long overdue!) and we’d love to hear what is important in regards to it from all of you!
What are you longing to see when you click that magnifying glass at the top of the screen? Should it even be a magnifying glass? What are things we should potentially steer clear of in regards to search?
Please use this thread as a place to suggest, comment, or just vent on all things search for the Glitch site.
I personally don’t have a sense of what’s out there even to search. my personal use of Glitch is full of little experiments and works in progress and low-effort things that would be hard for anyone else to comprehend. explicit sharing of Glitch projects in a ‘good’ state already takes place on other venues, and I think we already search those proficiently.
if people use Glitch like I do, then they don’t set up a meaningful project name. they might not even enter a project description. we’ve had a glimpse of what it’s like to take a sample of what’s (vaguely) active on Glitch: A look at the projects on one server. that’s just projects that people have bothered to visit, and it’s already full of “A simple Node app built on Express, instantly up and running,” and “This project is a base for importing git repos – if this is your project you can update the description to tell people what it does!” and “A faithful project that does genial things.” if search is going to include all projects, running or not, that’s probably going to be a lot of projects with no meaningful descriptions.
even if things are somehow tagged beyond my awareness, I’m afraid of how painful it will be to work through search results. web search these days return sites that load really fast. if I have to look through a list of Glitch project search results that each take ~15 seconds to boot up, I feel like I would give up easily.
I feel like a lot of things I might search for is sort of “how do I do X on Glitch,” but then I think about whether a Glitch project is the right kind of thing to answer such a question. an entire web app that I have to nose around in the file tree even to find what to look at? an entire web server where I have to think harder about how to compose the solution with what I’m already building? it’s not exactly the ideal.
looking forward to other people’s feedback. I’ve never really clicked that magnifying glass up there
Personally, the ability to quickly open many search results in tabs, like 30+ so I can tab through them and see what they’re about. Currently it’s very slow and there’s a rate limit I think I’ve hit. Perhaps through a code preview window that does not load the project, does not load the editor, etc.
Having the ability to use exclusion filters to exclude keywords that you’re not interested in.
I’m unclear if the current search indexes the source or just the project name and description. It would be helpful if it was a search of the code, so that you could look for specific usage as an example.
