Independent expenditure search: difficulty finding Form 5 filers

[PaulClark2]

What we’re after:
We need to ensure that all IE filers are available from our search tools.

Current state:
Some Form 5 filers to do appear if a user searches by name but do appear if searching by filer ID.

See for example, America Inc. C90014788

Completion criteria:

[lbeaufort]

Hi @PaulClark2 it looks like because the results are sorted by receipts (and contributions are not often reported by C9 filers), C9 results are more likely to be at the bottom. Results are limited to 20 on the API side, but it looks like the front end is showing top 10.

https://github.com/fecgov/openFEC/blob/develop/webservices/resources/search.py#L48

Also, the search uses the widely implemented full-text filter function (filter_fulltext), which does a fuzzy match, which is why it doesn't appear - there are more than 20 results that fuzzy match "America Inc"

[PaulClark2]

Thanks for looking at this. I'm not sure how to move forward on this. So, folks will have problems finding F5, F7 and F9 filers because these filers generally don't include receipts information. I'm not sure how to move forward on this. We need to think of a way for users to find these types of filers.

[lbeaufort]

One idea that comes to mind is weighting and displaying exact matches higher in the results. If there's a simple implementation it doesn't come to mind, but it could be done. We would want to be mindful of the broad scope of the filter_multitext function and make sure we only impact the /search/ (typeahead) endpoints.

[lbeaufort]

In sprint planning we decided to sort results by receipts + disbursements

[lbeaufort]

Issue moved to fecgov/openFEC #3057 via ZenHub