GitLab 14.2 Release Kickoff, 14 Jul 2021

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From YouTube: GitLab 14.2 - Enablement:Global Search

Description

Code Search for Big Code
https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/6220

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Hi I'm john mcguire. I am the search product manager and I'm going to take you through some of the changes that we have coming up for get lab, 14 2.. So the first item that we're looking at is the ability to sort issues and merge requests by the number of uploads and likes pretty simple. We've actually seen a lot of success. A lot of usage around some of the other sort options that we've made available in the past.

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You can see that we'll also be adding in the uh the little icon with the thumbs up or the like option in the result as well, so that, as you choose that, so we're going to be able to see that you did actually get a response back, that's worth these.

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uh The next item is around a use case that we've really found out that our users are using um global search a lot of times to just find a file.

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Sometimes you don't really want to try to hunt down a specific group or project, and it's just easier to just throw the file name or the path and file into the global search box. Up at the top, we love that feature anything we can do to really make finding a file easier is great.

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In this case, we have some options that allow you to save on your total indexing size, so you can set a max size limit uh for files that you don't want to index, and what we realize is that we don't really need to index that file.

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We can index those large files by just their path name, and so this seems like a helpful feature to really extend upon doing file searching when you have a file- that's maybe too large, to have normally indexed and gives you a better option trying to let go and extend the size of files that you index will be able to help you at least find a file.

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So this is a good step in trying to understand, like you know, enabling the use case of file searching through global search, but we are also looking at as we as we've been looking through how to improve the user experience. Something became very clear.

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Users are a lot of times really referencing like the same groups and the same projects.

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Every single day, and if you go to our search page and drop down these boxes, you get a long list of any groups, any projects that you're going to have access to it's a it's searchable, but I think we can even make it better, because if we just apply the recently searched items, that's going to help somewhere around 90 of the users that are really using the same groups and projects every day.

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You really see it a lot with groups, so this is hopefully going to make these drop downs and changing them a little less intensive or challenging.

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If, in the previous releases, we had updated how this looks in view, so it is more readable and so really interested to see. uh If this is, you know successful and to hear feedback from users on how much this is really gonna, you know help them just kind of navigate through the maybe handful of groups of projects that they're looking through um we're, always focused on improving performance and one of the areas.

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That's come up in the last couple uh couple months that we've seen we have an opportunity to improve performance on has to do with the service, for uh the search controller account. So in the example of search controller account is the uh the number that gets populated next to the tab in the global search.

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That is a call that happens at separate that actually looks for just getting the count back, but because this happens across those different tabs that are top.

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This can sometimes be in in a large amount of calls that can be six or seven or eight different calls uh happening at the same time it we think we have found a way to improve this quite a bit and if we can indeed improve the speed of these, these count calls we'll see an overall shorter amount of time to send any responses back through the elasticsearch service or anything that's using the search controller service, and that could create some improvements that go beyond just accounts and actually improve.

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Any potential bottlenecks might be happening to anything through the search controller, we're always happy to find ways to improve performance. And if this works, as we were expecting it actually could be a huge improvement for us and improve the experience for users that are using advanced search as well as using basic search.

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We are always kind of putting the next item in the pipe and part of that process is really defining out and looking at what is that right, user experience?

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We are doing some more user experience, research right now that has to do with adding labels as a facet into advanced search. Now I am incredibly excited as a product manager about being able to filter search results by how something is labeled. This is not going to live that. Yet this is about trying to understand what we want. That user experience to look like and operate like, so that we can, you know, make it easy to use.

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There are a lot of complexities that come with how labels can be set up, and so there is some testing you'll need to do with these, uh but I wanted to make it clear. This is something we're excited about we're working on we're kind of in that ux phase right now, stratifying like what that's going to need to look like, and it will be uh coming to us in a future iteration when we can, particularly so we can actually get this feature live and out there. So this is going into the pipe.