Hi Ernest,
Regarding my above idea for the Activity and User search results. I came to the realization today that there were more issues involved with the Activity results.
Even if the activity results were labeled as activity, they would likely display in search results before the user result, making the user result difficult to find. More importantly, I realized that the activity results are completely undifferentiated from each other. This is really the biggest issue with them. All of the activity results for a single user are identical, displaying only the user avatar and name. There’s no meaningful difference between them and thus no reason to click one or another. The only way they would be usable is if they included the actual activity item text. I highly recommend this to you as an improvement, as without this you see endless identical search results.
I’ve concluded that it is far more important to have an effective user search. It’s more logical to first search for a user, and then if you want to see their activity to go to it from their profile. The activity search results as they exist now only overwhelm the search with repetitive avatars and usernames. They make it impossible to find the user’s profile in the results.
I’m going to deactivate the activity results feature. It’s just not useful in its present form and detracts from the overall quality of the search results. If you decide to take any of my suggestions regarding the activity results please let me know.
…..
On another note, I’m running late today with my work and probably won’t get to the rest of my responses until this next week (Tuesday).
~ Michael