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hypothesis / vision

Envisioning the future of the Hypothesis.
https://github.com/hypothesis/vision/issues/
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Improved Search #205

Open blackforestboi opened 8 years ago

blackforestboi commented 8 years ago

Hi guys,

we have been thinking a lot about how to make the search experience better for users. Right now it is not really sufficient for a convenient usage of hypothesis. In your roadmap you already plan to improve this experience. This is (parts) of our idea how to do it.

This issue is limited to searching. We also have some improvements for filtering by tags and groups, but this will be another issue.

Downsides of current search:

  1. In the sidebar, we can only search the notes within the page we are currently on.
  2. In the sidebar, searching is only possible within the group you are currently working in. Generally, a group is an ideal way to organise notes into research projects (similar to a bookmarking folder). But switching through all of the groups to find a note on the site is just too much work to be called convenient.
  3. On the dashboard you can only search with text based filtering "tag:xyz" where the semantics are not at all clear to users
    • how to filter for multiple tags
    • how to search through one project only

      Questions to the hypothes.is team

  4. On what was your decision based to only search through the notes on the current URL via the sidebar?

    Improvement suggestion

  5. Letting users search through their whole database via the sidebar.
  6. Display all found notes in sidebar
  7. Implementing horizontal rulers in the sidebar, indicating:
    • "Found on this page"
    • "Found elsewhere"
  8. Change semantics of search. Having to type "user:WorldBrain tag:xyz" to search something is not ideal. Maybe just a full text search, excluding the tags? For filtering by tags we'll open up a separate issue.

    User Stories

Ray, a skeptic and blogger, frequently needs to use his notes again. For example when he needs a source for a claim he makes while debating in forums, facebook threads or when writing his blog posts in wordpress. Currently he saves his links, quotes and comments in text files. To find his notes again, he currently has to switch applications and search through multiple files with the keywords he might remember. But this is a quite laborious process. With hypothes.is or WorldBrain he expects to just open the side bar on whatever page he currently is and use the search field to search through all the notes he made before, regardless in which group they have been put in or on which page he made those notes. He dislikes switching windows or applications.

If he doesn't like to constantly switch applications and have a bulky search experience, why should he switch to hypothes.is if it is the same there?

Mandalka commented 6 years ago

If you need extended search, filtering & text mining features:

I integrated hypothesis annotations with Open Semantic Search.

The whole Solr or Elasticsearch based search engine is open source.