Include ability to add keywords to Phabs to make them more search-friendly
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	achandra
	Sep 12 2016, 2:53 PM

Description

Root problem: When I search through our organizations Phab repository, I find that I am often searching for terms that are not part of a relevant Phab's title or posts. This may be due to me not knowing how other engineers might submit a title, or not expecting that they would abbreviate certain terms or use alternate words.

Fore example, I searched for a Phab by using the search term "remediation window" and "remediation scaling" and found no results. However, the Phab that I needed was named "Remediation screen wider..."

Feature request: The feature I am requesting would provide an editable 'Keywords' field that anyone could enter new terms into, in order to make searches more effective. In the above case, I would add the keywords "window", "scaling", "scale" etc. to make it easier to find for other people that look for this Phab.

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achandra created this task.Sep 12 2016, 2:53 PM

achandra updated the task description. (Show Details)Sep 12 2016, 2:56 PM

So the solution here is to ask every user to add additional search terms to use Phabricator?

I would expect your search to return results. Do you have any unresolved setup warnings?

Basically, I don't see any root problem here that Phabricator can solve. Asking users to fill in additional fields isn't a scalable approach - either they won't do it, or they'll do it incorrectly, or it'll become too time consuming to provide any benefit. The cost/benefit there is just way too high. It's more reasonable to ask you to simply adjust your search query to fewer words.

Also, these words could already just natively be added ad-hoc to your commit messages, reviewers could ask them to properly document their changes, etc. All these naturally make Phabricator better today with no additional assistance. No additional field is needed to see a benefit.

Beyond MySQL's fulltext search, if you find that limiting, you could experiment with Elasticsearch to provide a different set of results.

I'm going to close this out since I don't think it's a problem we can solve without a more concrete set of examples that fail unexpectedly.

My feature request was not about asking users to fill in additional fields. It was about providing a keywords field that could be parsed during a search in case specific keywords might not be in the title or in the content of the phab. This is a feature that is part of many knowledgebases, and it allows additional search terms for a specific article or item without having to just type a bunch of words into the actual content.

The problem was not related to how many words I was using in my search query, but rather that the words I am using may not be the same as the words that someone else may be using. In the tech world, there are often multiple ways to refer to something. Instead of trying to force an entire company to use the exact same words for everything (which is impractical as there are different departments with varying degrees of technical vocabulary), it seemed simpler to just allow an OPTIONAL field in which to enter useful keywords that could be searched for.

What application are you referring to specifically?

Searching through Maniphest tasks in Phabricator

You can add this yourself as a Custom Field:

https://secure.phabricator.com/book/phabricator/article/custom_fields/

Sorry, I thought you were talking about commit messages, since you said "our organizations Phab repository".

That seems promising, I'll look into using a custom field. You can close this ticket, thank you.

Include ability to add keywords to Phabs to make them more search-friendlyClosed, InvalidPublicActions

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Include ability to add keywords to Phabs to make them more search-friendly
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