How to use Gnome Tracker? (sort/rank results)

[roweryan]

I use Tracker a lot, but after my recent Fedora upgrade I have had to stop using it.

I have a folder per year, with a filename format within each year, so:

2001/receipts.ods
2002/receipts.ods
2003/receipts.ods
…
2023/receipts.ods
and so on.

In 2023 I only touch the 2023 version of the file. I might open older versions of the file occasionally.

How can I ask tracker to show me the most recent results for “receipts” or “receipts.ods” when I search?

[sthursfield (Sam Thursfield)]

The simplest way I can think of would be to use Nautilus, search for receipts in the UI and then sort using the “Modified” column to show the newest file first.

[fabrixxm]

Something like

tracker3 sparql -b org.freedesktop.Tracker3.Miner.Files  -q 'SELECT ?f ?lastmod WHERE { ?f nfo:fileName ?name . ?f nfo:fileLastModified ?lastmod . FILTER(?name = "receipts.ods") } 
ORDER BY DESC(?lastmod)'

?

(which should give same result as @sthursfield answer )

[roweryan]

Aha - Can I make this the default?

I think the current results are unsorted, and I cannot influence the sort (they are not sorted by path or last modified at least). I wonder why the default was chosen.

[sthursfield (Sam Thursfield)]

In Nautilus they should default to being sorted by FTS match ranking, i.e. how closely the file matches the search terms. In the case of 5 files with the same name, I guess the order might be undefined. I wonder if it could be improved.

Looking at the innards of nautilus-search-engine-tracker.c it seems to only sort by rank currently - src/nautilus-search-engine-tracker.c · main · GNOME / Files · GitLab

[roweryan]

I wonder if it could be improved.

Can I request this somehow? Either taking the path into account or the modified time (or frequency - is there that? if yes recent frequency would be better).

[sthursfield (Sam Thursfield)]

If its a change request in Nautilus you can look at the issue here - GNOME / Files · GitLab - and open one if you don’t see your issue there already.