Searching for a plugin? Use Google
Today I wanted to download the plugin WP-Polls from the WordPress Plugin Directory. I did, what I think any visitor to the directory would do, enter the name of the plugin WP‑Polls in the Search Plugins box. WP-Polls is quite a popular plugin, so I had expected to see a result at the top of the first page. How stupid to expect such a result. WP-Polls is nowhere in the first 20 of 67 pages of results.
Searching for lazyest‑gallery yields one result: The Lazyest Stylesheet plugin.....
Google places WP-Polls right at the top of the results.
IMO, It's time wordpress.org ditches the native searchbar and put a Google searchbar in place.
@macbrink
brinkkemper1960
Marcel Brinkkemper
Lazyest Gallery
4 Comments
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Marc Lavine
15 December 2010Marcel,
I couldn’t agree more. Finding anything on wordpress.org, whether a plug in or some sort of help in the forums is almost impossible by searching. At the very least it would be good to combine tags and search words to narrow a search.
As an aside, if you type “Lazyest” in the plug in search, it finds both your theme and your gallery plug in. Sometimes less is more
although with the native search adding more search terms often gets you less helpful search results.
I appreciate you voicing this concern.
Marc
Marcel
15 December 2010Hi Marc,
And it’s quite important that WordPress.org native search gets updated. Using Google outside the wordpress.org domain will get you results from all kinds of shady plugin developers.