Add a Tag search facet by default

Development
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Hello,

I’ve noticed that several users have asked how to search for pages containing such and such tags and we don’t have an easy answer. They currently need to:

  1. Add a tag facet as documented at https://extensions.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Extension/Solr+Search+Application#HFacetingonObjectProperties
  2. Teach all the users to use the +(property.XWiki.TagClass.tags:tag1 property.XWiki.TagClass.tags:tag2) syntax which is quite hard

Thus this thread is to propose to add a Tag facet by default in XS, as tags are a core feature.

WDYT?

Thanks

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2

+1, but this means we may have to move the Solr search configuration (Main.SolrSearchConfig) out of the Solr Search UI application to the XS flavor, in order to avoid having the Solr search depend on the Tags application.

We also have to see if the default generic xproperty facet provided by the Solr search application is good enough, or if we need to implement a custom facet in the Tags application. The generic facet should be good enough for now I think.

Thanks,
Marius

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It is very unfortunate that this seems so difficult and didn’t get any attention yet. There are a lot of users complaining about that in the forums etc and probably a lot that just didn’t notice that it just doesn’t work.
Interesting enough it works with the Search Suggest Dropdown as a Workaround.

I think the search functionality becomes really the most important feature of a Wiki over time as it otherwise degrades to a wasteland. Tags could really help a lot to improve discoverability of information, but only if they are also used by the search. Otherwise they are pretty useless.

I have found that a lot of people are complaining, that they don’t find anything in our wiki so they don’t want to use it. I was wondering why. At first I thought it is because I am a power user so I know what to search for because I know the structure and titles etc. But it turns out most of these people do not use Search Suggest but rather intuitively press enter instantly and get to the search page which unfortunately is just not as good.

Matching tags should be ranked higher because they represent a user maintained index for pages that really matter. And they have to show up in the search results.

I have found that the LLM Application can really improve things here. I am not sure if it even indexes tags but the search results seem to bee quite good.