Search meta issue

[yeraydiazdiaz]

While working on the search portion of Warehouse I've been reading the many issues raised by users on the subject and thought we might want to clearly define the use cases for searching in PyPI.

So far I've identified the following use cases:

1. Project name searches: users that have a vague recollection of the name of a package or want to make sure of the spelling before installing. I believe this is the main use case for pip search. (pip3 search finds only libraries with whitespace/dash after search term #5506)
2. Solution searches: users that would like to know what the best package is for a particular task. This could be covered by a "popularity" feature however it's hard to get right as there's a lot of aggregated community wisdom that is just not reflected in terms of project metadata as names, classifiers and descriptions are sometimes lacking or misleading. (Search needs to surface the "best" packages #3932, Is spelling soundex etc. enabled for search ? How work search ? #3860)
3. Meta searches: users that would like to explore the project ecosystem based project metadata like interpreter versions, license, contributors, etc. (Advanced search #727, Add ability to exclude projects from search #1971)

I vaguely recall other use cases from the old PyPI search but I can't find it in the issues.

[azazel75]

Is it possible to limit the search just to the package name and not all the other (text) fields? More broadly there exists some kind of "grammar" to specify the search engine some constraints like and strict operators and such? I think that exposing some simple options maybe would be faster to implement and cover many of the users needs?