It’s always fun to see Discourse tackling alternative topic templates, but I don’t understand what the intent is here. If there ever was a context in which a column-based made sense, it’s search. That way you can re-sort your search by:
I do feel some of the columns should appear here but @sam disagreed. The main intent is for it to match “search” expectations and that means a Google style layout.
A lot of good points there that I hadn’t previously considered. I guess I’ve primarily searched for topics as a whole so far.
Perhaps the compact styling is a step forward after all. I still think there’s a lot of potential for improvements worth discussing, but I agree that we can leave it alone for now.
Edit: I still stand by this feature proposal though, even though the mockup isn’t quite as relevant any longer.
I actually think it looks fine as-is currently, we just need to move categories underneath the topic. We could also do that for the first poster avatar as well, if needed.
I do think it’s perfectly serviceable just making small tweaks to make it a little more scannable. I do, however, think you can be taking more advantage of your structured data. That’s the disadvantage of google, they have to show results for mostly unstructured data, so I don’t think you should compare your results to theirs quite as much.
I will only post this since it was asked, and considering I already whipped it up no reason not to see what you think.
I like this approach because while it’s not a table format, it still allows you to quickly scan the results to find what you are looking for. The most important aspect, the title, is first. If you happen to remember who posted it and/or when, you can quickly scan for that to the right. Last, but not least, the category/tags are at the bottom providing a little more meta data in a consistent location.
Like I said though, this might be overkill, what is already there would be fine with a little polish.
Here’s my case:
The most important part of search is relevance. I’d like to quickly get to the most viewed/most liked/latest results. However, I’d like to be able to select which of these matters for any given search because it’s not always the same. For example, searching for API questions, the most viewed matters most. In another topic, such as Dev Setup, the latest/most liked reveals information integrity.
It would be helpful if the search can be ranked by any of these criteria.