metacpan/metacpan-web

Allow sorting search results

Opened this issue · 3 comments

I went searching for Test and got 3,052 results. No surprise there. Some of them haven't been updated since the early 2000s.

It would be nice to be able to sort my search results to put the most-recently-updated distros at the top. It would also be nice to be able to sort the search results alphabetically.

Also, sort by rating would be appreciated.

salva commented

Besides allowing user selectable sorting criteria, I think that it is also quite important to improve the default order.

Currently, it seems the main criterion is the number of levels in the module name and that tends to favor old modules (which were able to pick the best namespaces).

IMO, default ordering should try to put at the top the best and the latest modules.

For instance, the following elements could be taken into account:

  • Number of likes
  • Number of releases
  • Number of releases in the last year
  • River position
  • References from other modules from different authors

Also, it seems that module names are just broken at the double colon ::. I think it would be a better to assume camel case, so that something like, for instance, List::UtilBy behaves in the same way as List::Util::By (currently, searching for list util doesn't show List::UtilBy).

All very good suggestions. Eventually I'd like to be able to sort on GitHub stars as well. We need better ways of having quality, maintained code bubble to the top.