Unified search improvements

[jancborchardt]

Discussion with @kra-mo and @marcoambrosini during design review call 2026-04-21

Problem statement:
We do have a unified suite of apps, but the search does not match up to it. A quality unified search which works both at app-level and for results around Nextcloud would put us ahead of even proprietary competitors – as these usually silo results within apps or contexts.

Performance improvements

• Faster results rendering, less jumping
• Needs to be as fast as the in-app search

Modal alignment adjustments

• Moving so it looks like a popdown of the new big search in the header
• Remove heading and close x
• Reduce height a bit

Result sorting & layout improvements

• Ref Spotlight iOS: https://support.apple.com/en-us/118232
• "Top hit" concept
• Rating results on a per user basis, bubbling up things that are more useful to them. E.g. If I often search "Accessibility", to head to the settings section, that should bubble up for me every time I'm typing that word
• Currently searching for a name doesn’t yield their 1on1 as first result
• Different layout based on app, e.g. Photos in grid view to make it less of a wall of results
• Only 1 section per app instead of multiple ones. MacOS Spotlight does not have sections at all, but this can also be confusing, and possibly difficult to implement
• Sort sections by result quality

In-app search future

• Check what to do with the in-app search when we have 2 present search fields
• First keep it, until the unified search is as good as the in-app search

External services

• Move from personal setting to include GitHub/Zammad/etc in search results which warns that every search will be sent to these services
• Instead use individual buttons in search to load results of connected external services
• Could even be linked to specific keywords relevant to that app like "issue", "pull request" etc.

[alexanderdd]

Thank you for working on this!

Some things I noticed on c nc com:

• too many and too many irrelevant collectives results.
• no result for "foo bar" but it should find the file "foo hello bar.odt".
• calendar results are very old events, should return recent events first.
• Full text search is supposedly activated but doesn't work
• pressing ctrl F opens the search. It took me many years to find out that you can ctrl f again to open the normal browser search, which I need a lot