In reply to Andrew.

I'm not sure that sends the right message though either. I mean do you really want to punish developers who have not only put 1000's of hours into developing popular plugins, but the countless more hours spent supporting it for free.

Based on your view, why bother to try and build plugins as a business at all, when the new guys can just come in and take what you spent all that time building. Its actually backward logic when you consider the commercial nature of the WordPress ecosystem as a whole. IE You want plugins to have long term support, you want developers to make enough to maintain and grow plugins, but you don't want them to show up in search results?

That said I do think they could put some effort into building tools similar to managewp.org such as "Up & Coming", "Highest Rated", "Newest" etc and still allow you to use keywords & tags inside those searches as well. They could be doing more with the ample data they have in terms of interconnecting things as well, such as being able to show related plugins or "other users who also looked at".

There is room for improvement, but I assume you don't really want to push LTS out the door for shiny fly by night plugins by authors who may or may not continue development & support them.

Just for reference, as you may notice from my obvious bias, I am a full time plugin dev who makes 100% of my income and several of my support teams incomes from plugins on the repo. Before the new search we had spent 2 years earning ~600 5 star reviews (mainly from excellent support) and 90k installs. We have kept our teams bills paid and such, but were not really doing great. In the old search we barely ranked at #18 for our main keyword, how is that fair? Now obviously we are #1 in everything and I have definitely seen a noticeable bump, feels like vindication in some sense, that we grinded it out for so long, hoping to be able to hire a few more people by years end if growth continues. So yea I'm a bit biased, and understand your points, I mean at one point (2 years ago) my plugin had no installs and no popularity, It was in that group of new plugins you are talking about. Pure drive & grinding it out is why we are now ranked so high, I imagine the same is true for any of the other plugin authors with popular plugins now.

Look forward to see how it plays out either way. Love that this many people are voicing their opinions as well in a constructive way. Kinda nice to see.