Popularity sorting packages

[ruslandoga]

Maybe package selection input could sort packages by popularity? I was typing out phoenix_live_view and it only "showed up" at "phoenix_live_v"

[ruslandoga]

+ maybe it could fuzzy search?

[ericmj]

Does typesense support a weighting we can use to oder by popularity?

The easiest popularity metric is recent downloads, but that changes with time. Would we want to periodically update that or is it enough to only grab it when the documentation is uploaded?

[josevalim]

Today the autocompletion is powered by a list of all packages names, at http://hexdocs.pm/package_names.csv.

To order it by popularity, we need to either:

1. Include download counts in the CSV (since the CSV is published on every new package, it is probably fair to assume it is updated somewhat frequently)

2. Use a separate endpoint (either from Hex or from Typesense)

Doing fuzzy search should be possible today. It would be done in JavaScript, as we keep all packages in memory.

[ruslandoga]

Does typesense support a weighting we can use to order by popularity?

Yes, kind of. Sorting can be expressions like sort_by=_text_match(buckets: 10):desc,recent_downloads:desc and recent_downloads could maybe come from a joined collection that could be periodically updated. But I haven't tried using joins this way yet.