When I first saw the 'keywords' field in bugzilla, I thought what a good idea... however the naming of that field isn't good.

The 'Keywords' field should be called 'Issue flags'.  And the keywords field should be for users to fill in extra keywords to make searching for issues better.  This would have a major impact reducing duplication of bugs, as if someone doesn't use the same words to search as someone who wrote the issue then it won't be returned in the results.  HOWEVER because keywords has been around for so long, I guess we would have to have a 'searchable keywords' filed instead.  I would still recommend renaming the keywords field though.

I currently try and add something like this at the end of the issue Description text:

[Searchable keywords: keywords, improve, search, searching, search tool, bugs, issues, bug, issue, bugzilla]

That's an example for this 'issue'.


A far better solution to my suggestion would be to have some automated thesaurus type look-up of similar words when someone is searching.  So if someone searches for "compiling on XP is slow" then extra keywords would be added to the search (probably with lower priority than the user's chosen search terms in case the guesses are wrong).  The extra keywords for "compiling on XP is slow" might be:

XP -> Windows, PC
compiling -> building, compile, compiles, build
slow -> inefficient, 'long time'

Does this already happen underneath the hood?  If so then this issue can obviously be closed ASAP (with a possible renaming of the Keywords field instead though) :)