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When searching for artifacts in the IDE's registered Maven repositories (by selecting "find" in the Maven Repositories context menu): In the generated "search results" node, there is no indication of what repo(s) contain the listed artifacts. This information is very useful for deciding what artifact version to include as a dependency. One way to implement this would be to add the repo names as child nodes underneath the individual artifact versions. Their tooltips should contain the repo's ID and URL in case of ambiguous names. A big advantage of this approach is that you could replicate the "Add as Dependency" context menu item on these child nodes as well; selecting it would add that specific repo to the pom file if the pom file does not already contain a repo which contains the artifact.
This should be a defect because currently, if the same artifact/version exists in multiple repos, the search results show multiple indistinguishable and often identical nodes, which is confusing (see screenshot). I would expect that even simply adding the repo names to the existing nodes (probably the easiest way to resolve this issue) would still result in some confusion and would make the results list unnecessarily long, but that's your call. Another consideration with the solution suggested in the original comment is that the source/javadoc overlays should also be moved to the child nodes.
Created attachment 144350 [details] multiple indistinguishable results
http://hg.netbeans.org/core-main/rev/6077cf37bf59 repository value is now added to tooltip, too late for any bigger ui changes. additionally, the results are now processed and any duplicate "local" results are removed in favour of their remote counter parts. That's the most common source of duplicates. However same bits coming from 2 remote indexes are still to be shown as 2 nodes.
Integrated into 'main-silver', will be available in build *201402190001* on http://bits.netbeans.org/dev/nightly/ (upload may still be in progress) Changeset: http://hg.netbeans.org/main-silver/rev/6077cf37bf59 User: Milos Kleint <mkleint@netbeans.org> Log: #240939 add repository to the tooltip and remove local repository items that are present in other repositories. That gets rid of the most common duplication of versions.
This old bug may not be relevant anymore. If you can still reproduce it in 8.2 development builds please reopen this issue. Thanks for your cooperation, NetBeans IDE 8.2 Release Boss
The tooltip still is there so P4, but it's still annoying to have to drill down then hover to see what should be available at a glance.