Search typeahead two words or more bug

[annhchen]

Typing two words or more (i.e. "wetlands mapping") only pulls up "users" with typeahead. "Wiki" and "tags" keywords do not show up. See attached image.

Similarly, typing in two words concatenated "oiltesting" also pulls up weird typeahead results.

[ebarry]

Tagging in @milaaraujo who knows this system best <3 <3 <3

[jywarren]

I think a close analysis of exactly what requests are sent by the typeahead as this is typed in would be a great debugging step for anyone who's interested in taking this up.

Noting a few potentially related issues:

#3472 - optimizing typeahead queries to reduce latency in response to #3147

#3172 - using the "debounce" strategy to optimize the rate requests are sent, and reduce responses over-writing each other out of order

Also, I believe there's a limit of 10 results somewhere, which may potentially clip off different result types if there are more than 10 user results. OK, it's here - d4f1624#diff-9546dd6074cdca7a128c2bf04fa5367aR50 although that doesn't affect other types, but I think -- ah yes, so here we limit to showing the first 10 of the results:

plots2/app/assets/javascripts/restful_typeahead.js

Line 11 in b1c5744

items: 10,

That means that if 10 users are returned, we only show users.

[milaaraujo]

Right now I'm working on the UI/API improvements for geographic features project, but after I finish it I can work on this one. I just don't know when it will be! So if anyone is interested, go ahead and I can help with any question about the current code.

[ebarry]

Is there a way to temporarily disable typeahead? It is unpredictable. At this point I do not think it's appropriate to have running on the live site, but it would be great to work on sorting out these bugs in a test site.

[milaaraujo]

So, we have two problems here: how the results are returned (only users) and the set of results (weird typeahead results).

1 - It is not a problem that happens only when we search two words, for example:
It happens because we use this dependency to for our navbar and search typeahead results. Part of the problem was documented by Steffani here (#3517).

2 - The results are not "wrong", this is not a "bug". For exemple, "oiltesting" returns -https://publiclab.org/notes/stevie/03-05-2015/gulf-coast-build-your-own-spectrometer-event - because in the post body we have:

Spectrometers can be useful in examining everything from the make up of your beer, to oil testing and food grade sampling.

So this is the way the full search works... We can stop using the full search and the results would be more predictable, I guess. What do you think, @jywarren?

[jywarren]

Just closing this up as I believe it is being addressed through a combination of UI and search functionality changes in #5708. Thanks!