Skip to content

Improve search errors or "no results" messages

Created by: sourcegraph-bot

Motivation

RFC / Initial search user journey

User problem

See one pager

Users onboarding Sourcegraph do not know the query language, which results in them encountering errors or "no results" statements. Recurring users also find error messages ambiguous or unhelpful.

  • The error messages are not self exploratory
  • Each error is a learning opportunity for the user, which we do not use
  • A few error patterns are recurring, and we should fix them.

Common errors:

  • The most common errors are documented here
  • No results
  • Too many repositories
  • Contexts not setup

Scope

Proposal

  • Alert content design is improved to be more consistent and usable 
  • Improving the no results page to show the basics of search (litteral = exact matches, a few common filters, etc)
  • “A new static 'No results page" with standard helpful search techniques and 'getting started' information”

Search bugs

https://github.com/sourcegraph/sourcegraph/issues/20817 https://github.com/sourcegraph/sourcegraph/issues/17714 https://github.com/sourcegraph/sourcegraph/issues/19095 https://github.com/sourcegraph/sourcegraph/issues/20117