Continuing the discussion from Discourse needs better search:
@JammyDodger FYI per 
I started applying SEO to Discourse plugins.
As a guideline… for official plugin topics the name should be:
or
or
Kind of depends on how many words you want to stuff and how it looks.
Ahh, I was hoping to avoid the duplication of the category (and/or tag) info in every topic title. Is this the only way to get search to work?
I know it sucks, but this is just how our search works.
Unless we change our indexing heuristics we are stuck with this. This is something @tgxworld has been extremely not keen on changing due to the large amount of churn and duplication.
Having a proper look at this, it makes the topic lists look pretty horrific https://meta.discourse.org/tags/c/plugin/22/official. We’re burying the distinctive piece of info in a lot of repetitive guff ‘Official Discourse Follow Plugin’, ‘Official Discourse Chat Plugin’. As well as bloating the inline inboxes Official Discourse Follow Plugin, Official Discourse Calendar (and Event) Plugin.
We’ve also lost a lot of consistency. If you want ‘Official Discourse Plugin’ included then they all need to have the same to match the pattern. Having variations isn’t great from a style guide perspective.
Honestly, I think we’re sacrificing human readability for this. I am not a fan. 
Maybe if search priority is high we stuff categories and tags into the title aspect
Let’s see what @tgxworld thinks
Changing the way we index posts and topics for search is always tricky. My hesitation to major changes stem from the fact that we don’t have a good way of knowing the full impact of the changes whenever we roll stuff out. We may be making search better for a certain case and making search worst for other cases.
Maybe the first small step we can take here is to support search with different indexing strategies? For example, we make it possible to allow site admins to specify that category and tag names for a post should be part of the A weight instead of being part of the B and C weights respectively. Then we can at least try that out to see how it feels before making a decision on whether we should roll out the new indexing strategy more widely.
I love this suggestion, it’s a low risk way of testing
One thing though worth pondering about @JammyDodger / @lindsey / @hugh
Is:
“Chat”
Category: plugin
Tag: official
Really such a better title for the topic than:
“Official Discourse Chat Plugin”
I get it is wordy… but the title “Chat” really gives you nothing… even if it is in the plugin category.
I’m not sure what you mean? Are you suggesting renaming the plugin itself to be something more descriptive?
But for the purposes of a topic list, I think too much duplication makes everything blur together:
Official Discourse Chat Plugin
Official Discourse Follow Plugin
Official Discourse Automation Plugin
Official Discourse Checklist Plugin
Official Discourse Solved Plugin
Official Discourse AI plugin
Official Discourse Assign Plugin
Versus
Discourse Chat
Discourse Follow
Discourse Automation
Discourse Checklist
Discourse Solved
Discourse AI
Discourse Assign
Chat Plugin
Follow Plugin
Automation Plugin
Checklist Plugin
Solved Plugin
AI Plugin
Assign Plugin
This all works visually as well and does not have the “search landmine” of “chat plugin” does not find chat plugin.
Discourse Chat Plugin
Discourse Follow Plugin
Discourse Automation Plugin
Discourse Checklist Plugin
Discourse Solved Plugin
Discourse AI Plugin
Discourse Assign Plugin
also seems fine, (without the official)
I guess … my objection is against the spartan:
Chat
Follow
Automation
Checklist
Solved
AI
Assign
These are all bad titles even though plugin category is enough to say it is a plugin.
I think the first example works better than the second. I think you need the keyword to not be sandwiched between the repeated words so people can pick it out easier (so either first or last).
I do still think including ‘plugin’ in the title of every plugin topic is redundant info though. I think it’s easier to see if you think of adding ‘theme component’ to all the theme-component ones.
That is where I am getting at.
Everything is redundant, just leave “Chat”
But “Chat” alone is a bad title for a topic.
Discourse is technically a lot more redundant than plugin its just a “visual” thing here that it "looks better without the sandwich as a trailing word.
At a minimum we need a very strict guideline here on naming in this category… with zero exceptions to enforce consistency.
Better-Anonymous (multiple anonymous accounts and other features)
(now smarter than ChatGPT)
Include new posts on summary/digest email
A pile with Discourse prefix a pile without
A bunch with plugin and a bunch without
Allowing pile on in topic title on a prioritized category means these just naturally win in search.
Honestly the long boring noisy should just win:
Discourse PLUGINNAME Plugin
Mixed on adding the official, we can live without it.
Have we done any research on the search terms folks are using to find these pages?
If folks are mostly searching for “Discourse chat” instead of “Discourse chat plugin” or “Official Discourse chat plugin” (and my hunch is that they probably are), then we should make our titles follow that convention.
Research aside, I think Discourse [plugin name] makes the most sense to me in attempting to balance SEO and human readability needs. Plugin is a bit inside baseball for a lot of folks, especially since we don’t use that nomenclature consistently in settings and many of these plugins are already bundled into core.
Imho this looks repetitive, especially if the first word is the repetitive part.
I would suggest something like below, however not entirely sure how well it would do with search. Just jotting down my thoughts.
I do agree that having ‘Discourse’ in there is also a little redundant/repetitive, but it’s to offset the brevity of the single word titles (and is also often the name of the plugin). We have dropped the preceding ‘Discourse’ from the /plugins page for better readability, but it doesn’t have the same effect in a topic list.
I think including it and having it first is the lesser of all the evils. It is a shame search can’t pick up on the category and tag signals I’m laying out for it, but if we really need to stuff the title with ‘plugin’ to make it work then so be it.
It’d be good if I could set a ‘pinned result’ for certain keywords. That way the instructions would always be top of the tree.
