Searching by author requires exact match of username; doesn't show partial matches or search real names

[transom]

Migrating from ​#wp15417:

If you search for plugins to install by author - say for example - Justin Tadlock - or - Tadlock - you get no results.

If you are aware that "GreenShady" is Justin Tadlock - you get a long list of plugins (as you should) all listed as by "Justin Tadlock"

This seems broken.

Per the comments, this is because we search only by exact of username. We should investigate fixing this when we work on the plugin directory in the future.

[ramiy]

See also #931

[Otto42]

#931 was marked as a duplicate.

[adiant]

Not sure whether to create a new ticket for this, but I'll start here:

I suspect a little bit of quiet thought would get most people agreeing with me that a Search by Author "must" be done against Display Name, not "real name". I'm not even sure how someone searching for a plugin would even know the "real name" if it is different than Display Name.

[Ipstenu]

Confirming this is still the case in the new directory and search (which I tested via trunk). @dd32 is there a possibility we could get searching on 'author name' from the main plugin file?

[dd32]

Currently the new directory is using the author_name WP_Query arg to search for plugins by an author, so it's limited to an exact match on w.org user *nicename*.

There's no reason we can't change that to instead search by data stored within ElasticSearch. @tellyworth knows far more about ES though, so everything that follows is my best-guess.

@tellyworth I'm thinking we could pass data to WP_Query such as [ 's' => 'Dion', 's_type' => 'author' ] and have the ES search flip which fields are searched upon by the s_type parameter?
We might need to index contributor names / committer names a little differently though as well, AFAIK, currently it only has access to user_nicename's in the search index? if we were searching upon the header_author meta it'd also be good to search upon contributors display_name for example.

[tellyworth]

I think this has been improved along the way, though there are still author-related searches that show odd results.

Results for "Dion" or "Tadlock" include on the first page plugins by dd32 and greenshady respectively, as well as plugins that mention those names in the description. The ranking may be less than ideal, but it does look to work. And certainly the ES query covers both the author and contributors fields, which should include both usernames and display names.

Author-only searches are a separate feature imho, so I think it's best to count this ticket as closed and open more specific tickets for related bugs.

[SergeyBiryukov]

Related: #2647, #2702.