Discourse works very well for the community that I energize. Over 7,500 teachers and counting. This growth is associated with a growth of groups, and it begins to be a problem for my users. The groups page works very well when you have few groups (<30) or you know what you are looking for.
But when you have a lot of groups, Groups page intimidates new users without much digital competence and without time to read dozens of groups. I would like my users to be able to search by concepts, for example: “mathematics” and that all related groups appear.
Thinking of introducing few changes in the design:
That the group search engine also search in the description of the group. So, I can say to my users: search for #mathematics and include these #hashes in the description.
Add tags to groups but with a different name to prevent confusions. Maybe “collections” or something like that…
As a thought in the meantine. Have you considered making a post with or without page publishing?
You could for an example use things like Hide details and/or theme-component Automatic table of Content amoung other things to organize your Groups into categorized groups.
You could likely even use the Docs plugin as well using Tags possibly to make group searches quicker?
I try to do something in the way you talk Dan (thanks) but the result wasn’t good. I will try once but i think, humbly, that Discourse needs to rethink this group page for larger communities with a lot of groups.
This feature did generate some dev interest and overall it was thought to be a good direction to move in However, it’s not been prioritised yet under the current project schedules so I’m afraid I don’t have a timeline (or a guarantee) of if/when it would be picked up.
I did spot in your example that you have a few automatic and private groups showing up, which made me think it’s of the admin view. Could you do a similar one from the perspective of a non-staff member to better illustrate their view of the page?
I think allowing the existing freeform search/filter box to match on description here makes a lot of sense.
On the surface, it feels like that should be a reasonably small and low risk change to make. Will check with others to see if I’m underestimating that though.
In the meantime, perhaps using more verbose group names could help?
When you click in a “fake” group, you’re redirected to a real discourse group. Periodically, i refresh the number of members manually. It’s a workaround… waiting a native and cool solution from Discourse
However, it’s not been prioritised yet under the current project schedules so I’m afraid I don’t have a timeline (or a guarantee) of if/when it would be picked up. 
