Galaxy: display ranking of tool search results
The ranking of search results is not as good as it could be. With the default ranking settings, a search for the tool "BAM-to-SAM" is having an exact hit but is only ranked at position three of three. See attached image.
It looks like k-mers are not computed. A little typo like "PileOMth" instead of "PileOMeth" generates no result instead of one. It would be better for the users if little typos are allowed.
joachimwolff
All 10 comments
@joachimjacob
You can configure the instance's search here: https://github.com/galaxyproject/galaxy/blob/dev/config/galaxy.ini.sample#L891
The results shown are not ranked top to bottom - it respects their order in the tool panel instead.
Agreed that fuzzy search would be an improvement and worth an issue.
martenson
on 6 Dec 2016
@martenson
I understand why it is done this way right now and i know how to tune the parameters. With not that many tools it is a good way to present the search results. But with an increasing number of tools it is getting confusing where the tool is - and if it was found. For example "cufflinks" is an exact hit and it is at position number nine.
joachimwolff
on 6 Dec 2016
@joachimjacob I think one of the reasons why the search results are not re-ordered dynamically for each call is to prevent confusion.
Positions in the toolpanel after search are not ordered, so there is no 'position nine' for cufflinks. Also what you call an 'exact hit' is not that clear in many cases since we search on more attributes than the displayed name.
Maybe you could try experimenting with tool_search_limit to provide less results to filter this?
I understand what you are asking for though and it makes sense to me too.
martenson
on 6 Dec 2016
Since fuzzy search was implemented in https://github.com/galaxyproject/galaxy/pull/3356 and I don't think we are going to support a ranking of results, I'm going to close this. Feel free to re-open if I've missed something.
nsoranzo
on 23 Jan 2017
I strongly disagree. Ranking should be supported, give us please an option in the galaxy.ini config to activate it if we want to us it. At all our galaxy courses the users ask us why the tools are always 'somewhere' and not number 1 hit as they know it from google. The current search leads to the use of a second search: ctrl + f. This can not be wanted.
Thanks for reconsidering!
joachimwolff
on 24 Jul 2017
@joachimwolff I am willing to try implementing this as a configurable option.
martenson
on 24 Jul 2017
@joachimwolff I think this is a valuable issue and with the rewrite of toolpanel by @inkuzmin that made it to 19.09 this is now substantially closer.
martenson
on 16 Sep 2019
Implemented in #9579 I believe.
martenson
on 24 Jul 2020
It is better now, but still not fixed. You need to search for the right prefix and typos are not allowed.
joachimwolff
on 4 Aug 2020
@joachimwolff Does your instance have fuzzy search configured? https://github.com/galaxyproject/galaxy/pull/3356
martenson
on 4 Aug 2020
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Most helpful comment
I strongly disagree. Ranking should be supported, give us please an option in the galaxy.ini config to activate it if we want to us it. At all our galaxy courses the users ask us why the tools are always 'somewhere' and not number 1 hit as they know it from google. The current search leads to the use of a second search: ctrl + f. This can not be wanted.
Thanks for reconsidering!