While I have been testing out the fedora 18 beta, i noticed a significant change in the behaviour of the search in the overview mode. A good example of this is if you search for either "browse" or "web" in F17, you will get firefox in the results. However, in f18, searching for "browse" or "web" does not show firefox at all.
I discovered this a few weeks ago, and filed bugs both against fedora[1] and upstream in gnome[2], and the gnome bug has some insight into what has changed. Previously, in f17, the gnome-shell search matched against the fields for Name, Command and Comment. However in Gnome 3.6 in f18, it no longer matches against the Comment field.
According to the response in the gnome bugzilla, the gnome-shell tool does now match against "keywords" that are specified in the desktop file, but it seems that not many desktop files have relevant keywords specified.
In short, there are a lot of search terms that people were able to use in f17 that will now be broken in f18, as the majority of desktop files do not have relevant keywords specified.
I'm not sure what the best plan is to fix this. The tagger app for fedora does have a lot of great keyword data already for packages, but it seems like a lot of work to update every package with keyword metadata when the old way worked, even though it was a bit crufty and matched "in"s and "on"s and other small words in the comment field.
cheers, ryanlerch [1] - https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=864593 [2] - https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=685824 [3] - https://apps.fedoraproject.org/tagger/dstat
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