[wp-meta] [Making WordPress.org] #7648: Stop weighing active installations in plugin search heavily

[Making WordPress.org]

#7648: Stop weighing active installations in plugin search heavily
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 Reporter:  Cybr              |       Owner:  (none)
     Type:  defect (bug)      |      Status:  new
 Priority:  normal            |   Milestone:  Improved Search
Component:  Plugin Directory  |  Resolution:
 Keywords:                    |
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Comment (by gibrown):

 > This imbalanced gap is ever-increasing, promotes anti-competitive
 behavior, and discourages developers from contributing since all their
 hard work will quickly prove a deigned futility.

 The goal behind the ranking alg is giving end users the best plugin
 experience possible. The user is trying to solve a problem and plugins
 that have a larger install count are much more likely to provide good long
 term support. There are also a number of other factors used in the alg
 that help newer plugins improve their rankings (support thread resolution,
 ratings, etc).

 The search alg has already been somewhat designed to do this. As the
 install count increases, the boost that the alg provides doesn't go up as
 quickly (though it does need to go up somewhat). There is a very strong
 inflection point around ~20k installs. More background from my original
 post discussing the alg: https://data.blog/2017/03/15/improving-relevance-
 and-elasticsearch-query-patterns/ IIRC a hard cutoff (or even a slower
 growth logarithmic) can create some strange dynamics for certain searches
 where very obviously worse results were getting recommended.

 I think the best ways to help new plugins is to add better filtering and
 sorting options to the UI so that those plugins can be found more easily.

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Ticket URL: <https://meta.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/7648#comment:3>
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