Someone on the chat of generators page at 1:14am today asked: “How do I find roleplays here? I find the generator overwhelming but if I go to search it just takes me to google. I assumed creations would show me like a.i people have already made”

I remember a while ago Perchance saying Findability could be improved. I agree and had been thinking maybe have a community event of everyone suggest stuff for ‘generator finding’ and for a while dabbled in recording which generators passed thru the Generators page that I thought people really cared about and were following up on and making a personally curated list, which I know many others have occasionally thought similarly and tried.

But none of that is really a concrete followable step by step improvement. Tonight tho, with that comment, here is one: Make the Search feature a real feature.

Right now it DOES feel ‘underwhelming’ in that someone clicks Search at the top of the Generator’s page, and then it is ‘surprisingly disappointing’ when it does not really search through generators, but opens up a google with a specific search term. So here is a concrete suggestion as to improving findability while also pulling up something that has fallen behind in quality compared to everything around it: Upgrade Search Function on Generators Page. Make the search a real thing :)

  • BluePower@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    2·
    7 months ago

    Worth to note that if the search feature would’ve searched the entire generators page, it’d only search through the generators that were last edited at most approximately 1 day ago (as per the set limit of generators that the generators page can show). The Google search pretty much searches through all indexed generators throughout the entire platform that aren’t even listed on the generators page.

    But @[email protected] I think you should change the search bar’s search button to look like this:

    And then the search box could be used for searching across the generators page directly (kind of the same functionality as my generator hub collection page).

    • allo@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      2·
      7 months ago

      I think it should be able to search through ALL the generators, not just those currently visible on the generators page; ordered by a mix of recentness, searchtermcloseness, and popularity

      • BluePower@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        2·
        7 months ago

        I think so. Though it might need some mass-fetching of generator databases in the searching process (or we could use a search API built into the page so it could search all generators).