Is this intended to be permanent?
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:
…with a button-click.
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.
This did not fit in to discovery, it was hack mountain
My question is, can you make a strong case that we need to display
Number of views with each results(which is a topic level stat not a post level one)
List of participants on topic with each post? Then you show 4 avatars + the person who made post
Last post date on topic? How do people not get confused with the date of the post
Tracking state/unread counters that are topic level stats?
I have a very hard time making a case for any of that
Instead we can simply add an easier and more intuitive way of reordering results
Eg ordered by (drop down with relevance selected)
I would rather we revisit some of this later rather than scope creeping a bunch now, too. We have enough work to get 1.4 out the door in 6 to 8 weeks.
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 agree this still weirds me out, every time I get full page search results it feels jarring to me.
I will try to match styling a bit more. Line height is clearly way wrong
Ok here is the tweaked version:
I think it’s much better now.
Hmm. I wonder if category (and tags?) should be underneath the title, since that’s a closer analog to what Google puts under the title:
yeah, possibly, it will make tags and categories align nicely.
Consider me as a +1 to placing them under the title too. I think that would work really well.
We plan to do this pretty much everywhere if the tagging plugin is enabled, so it makes change to change here as well. I will get to it.
I feel like leading with the avatar before the title may also be making it a little more difficult to parse.
I made some mockups of possible alternatives. I think I like the last one the best:
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.
Very nice, that also solves my “it seems like there should be a column here somewhere” problem.
Yeah, that was bothering me as well. There will have to be slight modifications for the mobile view, but that should be easy enough.
Oh that’s nice. Just align the tags with the category (they look a little off).
Good eye. I updated the image. Although now that I look at it again, I think the first tag is still off by a pixel or two. Oh well.
Cool. I really like that layout.
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.
