x/pkgsite: improve search ranking heuristics or add a way to search by package name #51775
Description
What is the URL of the page with the issue?
What did you do?
I searched for constraints, slices, and maps on pkg.go.dev in hopes of finding golang.org/x/exp/constraints, golang.org/x/exp/slices, and golang.org/x/exp/maps.
What did you expect to see?
Since I'm searching for the exact package name, and the packages I'm looking for are from golang.org, I would expect my desired results to be near or at the top of the search results.
What did you see instead?
For constraints, the search worked pretty well. golang.org/x/exp/constraints was the second result.
The first place result doesn't actually say "constraints" in the package name, import path, or top-level doc comment, but it does contain the word "constraints" in the README as well as a Constraints type.
For slices the search worked less well -- golang.org/x/exp/slices was the 16th result. Most of the first 15 results do not contain the word "slices" in the import path; typically it appears in the README or documentation text.
When searching for maps, golang.org/x/exp/maps doesn't even appear on the page. I have to hit "Show more results" and then the package is number 59.
I think these search results could be improved. For a start, if the search query exactly matches the package name, I think that should push the ranking up a lot higher. Also, I think that golang.org packages ought to rank pretty highly in general.
As an alternative to changing the ranking, the search page could provide a special syntax for searching by exact package name. I appreciate that when I put in a full import path, it takes me directly to the page for that package -- but typing out golang.org/x/exp/maps is pretty tedious, so being able to type something shorter like /maps and get shown a list of packages named "maps" would be pretty helpful.
Finally, FWIW, a general comment about how I use the pkg.go.dev search functionality. One kind of search (we could call it a "discovery search") is where I type in a search concept hoping to find a list of popular packages related to this concept. For instance, I might type "b-tree" and hope to find the popular packages implementing a B-tree. This seems to be the main kind of searching that pkg.go.dev is optimized for. For me, these kinds of searches are exceedingly rare -- <1% of my search volume. For most searches, I know exactly the package that I want to call up, and I'm trying to get to the page as efficiently as possible, and I feel that the search tool could help me more in this regard.