In reply to Rick Gregory.

The fact that they seem to be rigging the results...

Who is rigging results, how, and who benefits?

If the suggestion is that Automattic are intentionally rigging results to make JP rank above other plugins, then I think that's a baseless conspiracy theory.

If I search for ‘search’ then the most relevant results should be at the top.

It's often difficult to gauge user intent and relevancy for generic one word queries like "search"- is a user looking for a search engine optimzation plugin, a plugin for implementing Google custom search, or are they looking for Omnisearch in JP that allows them to search within the admin?

If we enter one word into Google, and it doesn't return results we like, then we add more words to the query to make it more specific. It's the same for the repo.

On the issue of active installs being used as a ranking factor, it's useful again to look at how Google does things. When multiple urls contain similar keywords, Google looks at other signals.

One of those is the amount of inbound links. If url A has one million links, and url B has a thousand, then that can be used as one sign that people seem to prefer one url over the other, and it should therefore be ranked higher (obviously, this can be gamed, the quality of the links and anchor text are also factors).

In a similar fashion, it makes sense for the repo to heavily weigh the number of active installs in its ranking algo as a trust signal. If multiple plugin pages contain similar keywords, then other factors have to be taken into account in order to determine which ranks higher.

JP ranks for a wide range of terms because, for better or worse, it contains a wide range of functionality which is detailed on its plugin page - galleries, carousels, CDN (Photon), related posts, Omnisearch, portfolio & testimonials CPTs, Facebook opengraph & Twitter cards, social sharing buttons, bruteforce security and login protection etc.

In addition to that, it also performs well when looking at other trust signals - number of installs, last updated, support threads resolved, and user reviews.

I don't think these trust factors have been introduced into the algo as part of a conspiracy by Automattic to rig results in their favour; they're being used to provide users with result pages that contain a list of plugins that are relevant to their query, up to date, are supported, are well reviewed, and have large numbers of sites that appear happy to use them.

On the issue of filterable results, if you read the conversations among the meta team over the past few months, you'll see that they too want to be able to allow that, but first they had to work on the infrastructure behind WP.org they before they can introduce that functionality. By all accounts, WP.org appeared to be previously held together by a combination of spider webs, magic, and Otto.