'filter issues' feature isn't very good

I noticed a bug about user account deletion. Before adding a new issue, I tried to search for an existing one. Because etiquette.

I tried these search terms:

• user delete issues
• user delete

...But got no hits for either.

Then I searched for just 'delete' and I found this: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/12726

The title of which is "Deleting user should not delete their issues", which contains all three of my initial search terms in the subject.

So that result should have been returned! Bug! :)

Added ~89854 label

Added ~14281 label

/cc @DouweM @dzaporozhets

@sebboh not really a bug, just poor choices. Search is not the most helpful instrument right now, so that you for the alert.

Not a bug. Current database search looks for exact match. @vsizov how about Elastic?

@dzaporozhets As I understand, we are talking about issue filter which does not use ES.

If I use elastic for search I can found a plenty of issues by those queries (including the mentioned issue) https://gitlab.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&search=user+delete&group_id=&project_id=13083&scope=issues&repository_ref=

this is strange, it looks like the elastic search doesn't work well enough

as if it doesn't query the words loose from each other, like google does...it searches, if no exact match, the ones that comes closest

mentioned in issue #21747 (closed)

@dimitrieh Not sure what are you talking about. The issue filter does not use elastic search as I said above.

@vsizov if I put user delete issues in the search bar to search for, right now it searches for exactly those words in that order with the amount of spaces between them... like searching in google for "user delete issues"...

However the search we would like to do is: user+delete+issues

Search for each of those words, have the search result be returned in the following order:

• searches where these words are exactly matched in that order right after each other
• searches where these words are all found throughout the searched content, but not right after another
• searches where for example at least 1 or 2 of the words are found in it
• searches with 1 words in it etc

@dimitrieh But what makes you think that it's ES search? ES is disabled on gitlab.com now. We use stemming and other cool "full text search features" in ES so it recognizes the different forms of words like "delete", "deletes", "deleted", "deletion". The same about words order and spaces.

@vsizov why is it disabled?

because we had to build index, it's a long process.

Removed ~89854 label

I removed "search" label because this issue is not about search at all.

@vsizov any solution?

My personal opinion is that the filter should be removed because it's useless for issues. Such filter would work for user names but not for the issues. Now it confuses people and that's it. If you really want to find something you need to use search engine. Regardless if the ES is enabled or not we use full text search (ES or Posgres trigram). /cc @JobV

I don't think we should remove the filter yet, as ES search is still too slow on GitLab.com.

@JobV it's still not enabled on gitlab.com.... I believe in 8.11 it's much, much faster.

Added ~874211 label

Closing in favour of https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/20362

There is a ~"Community Contribution" to fix that issue

closed

added devopsplan label