IA 2.1: Discovery: Make search experience more powerful

[niquewoodhouse]

Intro

As part of testing IA experiments #19706, we've seen an interest from users in the following improvements:

• Using the search to search for messages
• Support for filters (eg "text:in#room-name from:user....")
• Improvements to design (we will address these with a longer term view of what we would like to support in the search)
• Result ordering and structure, including:
  • Spotlight search should prioritize results from current space #20559
  • Spaces/metaspaces unexpectedly switches spaces around from under me as i search for users via spotlight #20769
  • Search ordering in unified search dialog #20635
  • Three-party DM display one mxid in search results #20634
  • New search should order results by frequency of accepting them #20538
  • Result groupings

Select user insights

“Sometimes search bars have some special things you can do, eg visual code - colon does something, the first character of the search defines what happens”

“Adding support for message search seems like a nobrainer. Also adding filter support like discord and slack have:
"text" in:#channelname from:user ,...” Link

Task

• Survey users with proposals for search experience result ordering improvements #21139
• Compile search survey and feedback learnings into a proposal #21291
• Update design for the new search experience to include public rooms and people in results #21352
• Provide options that enable this
• Test options in prototypes with cohorts of new and experienced users
• Identify what else might be helpful to users and why (eg search files)