Unable to enable AI search results when there are no regular results

UX
1

Under some circumstances, one has to jump through many hoops to be able to enable AI search results.

  • have your search “sort by” to latest posts
  • have a search query that does not yield any non-AI results (it does give results)
  • go to advanced search
  • you get no results (feels weird since you did get results on the previous page before switching to advanced)
  • and it shows “AI results unavailable”
  • it is impossible to turn the AI results on because the sort order is not set to “relevance”
  • it is impossible to set the sort order to “relevance” because there are no results
  • there are no results because I cannot turn on AI results

The only way out is to

  • change the search query so it does give actual results
  • that makes the sort order dropdown appear :tada:
  • set sort order to “relevance”
  • enable AI results
  • enter the original search query

2

The gist of it is that we don’t show the sort by always, which can lock you out of AI search since we now, unfortunately, persist the sort order, right?

3

Right. But maybe that “show AI results” switch should not be disabled, but simply force the “relevance” sort order when enabled.

4

I considered that, but I’m afraid it may confuse users. If we can make it obvious that the order is also changed it may work.

What do you think @awesomerobot ?