Hi Assaf,
1. The search is too general (IMHO).
If I search for "rna", I get (among other tools) the "lastz" tool, because it has the following line in the help section: === 3. RNAME Reference sequence NAME === (Note the "RNA" in "RNAME"...)
To be useful, the basic search has to include the tool name and possibly the description, and preferably some keywords (specified manually in the XML). An advanced search might offer a global text search.
Changeset 4008:40bfc0def292 introduces some of these needed features: title and description are now searched in addition to help, and a minimum score is used to remove poor matches. More work may be needed to further tune the search results (e.g. minimum score may be too low, perhaps whole word searching should be used for help and partial word searching used for tool name/description); we'll see how these changes work and refine as necessary.
2. The "recently used tools" is not updated after running a new tool. One has to reload the page (and then the list is hidden by default).
3. a small bug: 1. reload galaxy (for a clean start) 2. click "options->Search Tools" (search box is shown) 3. click "options->Show recently used" (recently-used menu is shown) 4. Search for a tool which is NOT in the recently used menu (e.g. search for "foobar") 5. The "recently used" menu is forever gone, no way to get it back: the "options" menu still says "hide", but even clicking multiple times on hide/show does not bring it back.
I can't seem to reproduce these on the current build. However, both of these issues were certainly occurring in the past; changesets 3953, 3954, and 3955 should have resolved these issues. Please let us know if you're still seeing them on the some browsers/platforms.
4. not necessarily a bug: All workflows in the "workflow" menu (i.e. workflows that were configured to be on the user's tools menu) are always displayed, regardless of the active search. This is probably by design, but it's conceptually confusing (because you encourage users to use workflows as regular tools in that menu).
Partly by design, partly because it's not clear how to filter workflows right now. One idea is to add a small horizontal separator between tools and workflows so that the division is clearer and hence it's clearer what results are being filtered. We'll work on this. Thanks, J.