Linus Nordberg:
emma peel emma.peel@riseup.net wrote Fri, 16 Nov 2018 07:41:00 +0000:
silvia [hiro]:
On 11/15/18 10:06 AM, emma peel wrote:
What I like about the 'central search' idea is that you can get a User Manual result when searching Tor Support... because we have so many different pieces of content that I liked the idea of moving the user from one site to the other through the searches.
Is this still going to happen with your proposal?
I like that too, but I think UX wanted search results per portal?
I don't know about doing it project-wide, but I feel that for example support.torproject.org and tb-manual.torproject.org could share search results.
I think this is a good time for figuring out what Tor Project wants from a search function. I've put down a couple of statements sprinkled with questions below. Please jump in and argue against false statements and answer questions where possible. And please add more questions.
Thanks Linus! Thoughts below:
- The web site support.tpo needs a search field and a button next to it resulting in the user seeing a list of matching url's (and their titles) in their browser.
Agree.
What corpus would such a search look at? support.tpo only? support.tpo and tb-manual.tpo? More than that?
Are there other tpo sites that need/want a search function? Should search results include matches from other tpo sites as well, or only the one the user is currently visiting?
I think search should have the capacity to look across the website, with buttons allowing the user to limit results to just the portal they're currently looking at should they choose.
Sending the user to a separate site, say search.tpo, is considered not UX friendly enough.
Is search.<site>.tpo good enough?
I don't have an opinion on this, will defer to UX people.
Are we limited to using solr, as mentioned in #25322, or can we explore other options?
User fronting tpo web sites are "on the static rotation" because that's how we can keep them up and running given the resources at hand. Adding dynamic content, i.e. anything that is not "oh, that url corresponds to this file, let's send it to the user", would not be possible on our current set of VM's given the load we see on user facing tpo websites. This means that one of the proposed solutions with web servers proxying requests to a separate service, search.tpo, is not an option. Another argument against proxying is that it breaks the expectation of end-to-end security given by HTTPS.
I don't have an opinion on these last two either. :)
Alison