- I have ~200 PDFs of papers which I sometimes search through using Nautilus full text search after navigating to that directory. That’s usually the case if I can’t find a paper based on the keywords in Zotero and have to search through the full text.
- I have an indexed Dropbox folder containing all the course materials from my studies. Those are ~1500 PDFs that were primarily generated from PowerPoint slides. Almost none of these have useful file names but they are grouped into subdirectories by course. I navigate to the respective subdirectory and use full text search from there.
- I use the (recursive) nautilus search in unindexed source code directories to find and open files
- I use the nautilus search for navigation in the current directory (usually non-recursive)
- I don’t use file search from the overview, because the results it can provide are not specific enough
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I frequently use Search to find documents on my system across a variety of different folders, and I also use it as a Calculator (via the Calculator search provider)
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I mostly use the same patterns as described above, maybe some slightly dfiferently:
- Use Nautilus search to quickly jump to subfolders when many exist by typing one or more characters in them, both on local as well as remote folders (SFTP/SSH).
- Use Nautilus search to find some deeply nested folder where I know its name, but not its full path because it is complex (e.g. some cache folder of some application).
- Use GNOME search to find documents somewhere in my Documents folder if I know the name.
- Use GNOME search to find and immediately copy emoji’s from the characters application by name because most applications don’t have the nice GTK emoji picker.
I have a music collection of ~3,000 downloaded albums in FLAC format which I browse with GNOME Music
This is me. To add complexity, it is mounted over SSH/SFTP on a high-speed network, but on a slow NAS and a slower HDD because it’s too much for my internal drive. I currently index it with Lollypop, because past uses of GNOME Music with Tracker didn’t work for me; I don’t know if it refused to track data from mounts, or if it was too slow to happen correctly - even Lollypop takes a few minutes to reindex the collection, so I wouldn’t be surprised if was a performance problem. (Another problem used to be that GNOME Music refused to index anything from anywhere but your home folder music folder, and it didn’t follow symlinks, not sure if that still applies.)
Apart from what I do, in the like department I would like to be able to browse browser (i.e. Flatpak Firefox) bookmarks without having some extension installed. I currently work around this by having .desktop files with the URL of the bookmark, and I can then search them by name. This works reasonably well, but they are a bit cumbersome to create each time.
I almost never do full-text search. What I search for 99.9% of the time are filenames. I want search for filenames to work really, really well. I expect the content of the files does not matter when searching for filenames, and it should work well everywhere. It’s very frustrating to see that no longer works in git repos out-of-the-box, and that special tracker configuration is required for GtkFileChooser to find my files. I’ve mostly given up on using GtkFileChooser and switched to opening all files in nautilus instead. This is not smart. By default, tracker should index filenames in the entire home directory, at minimum, even if it doesn’t index everything else.
Much less important: I typo things a lot. Would be nice if our search features considered edit distance (e.g. Levenshtein distance) and displayed results accordingly. For example, if I search for “documnet” it would seem pretty easy for GNOME to display results for “document.” I even wrote a patch for this at one point, although it’s rejected and 10 years old now, and I’m not sure how we would find it with Bugzilla now a static site.
Thanks for the many detailed replies, much appreciated!
I currently have time to look at creating initial test cases in OpenQA for GNOME’s existing search functionality, based on the use cases described above. I’ll share more details once I have something useful to show.
There’s a lot of other useful feature requests and feedback in this thread, if anyone reading this can volunteer some time to look at them then please get in touch (via Discourse or in #gnome-tracker) and we can come up with plans to fix them 
Hi, I’ll add my usecases and my personal experience (gnome 43 on ubuntu). My entire home directory is indexed (with the exception of folders for npm, virtualenv and such folders). My primary use cases are:
- Launching apps (works very well for me)
- Finding files using full text search (works ok).
The full text search use case in more detail: thousands of documents accumulated over many years. Mostly pdf / office documents/ plain text or markdown notes. My search experience is: it works ok. Searching by filename works very well. Searching by full text is a matter of luck, although I cannot pin it down to a specific problem… rather slow and does not find stuff as well as on my macbook. Typical content:
- A few thousand pdf documents containing technical specifications (in a git-lfs repo).
- A single folder with a few thousand markdown or plain text files containing notes (synced using nextcloud).
- Personal files in a per-year folder structure, containing e.g. scanned and ocr’ed pdfs such as invoices, web pages saved to pdf, and office documents using microsoft office as well as libreoffice.
- Multiple folders are synced to my local hard drive using collaboration tools such as git-lfs and nextcloud. In my experience, the syncing does not seem to affect search.
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