Plots2: Existing tags not showing up as an exact match in search bar autosuggestions

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Hi @bhamster07 thank you for a very clearly documented observation and idea! ✨

I'm going to try to tease out some details here to help. My questions:

1. what is the current sorting?
2. where in the code would we be able to insert an exact match to add it to the results?
3. would it cause any slowdown to add a 2nd query? (autocompletes are very latency sensitive for the user - we want it to be as fast as possible)
4. do we need to worry about filtering it out of the remaining results once we add it at the top? (this seems easy so why not)
5. would adding the exact match at the top result in any other features on the site getting affected? (i.e. do we use this matching generator for other purposes where we don't want this modification?)

OK, so to 1) i see this endpoint where we're responding to autocompletion: https://publiclab.org/tag/suggested/mapping (only accessible via JavaScript):

https://github.com/publiclab/plots2/blob/158fadc6ed12b66bd0b17f65a134cef59b81cfee/app/controllers/tag_controller.rb#L394-L401

Note this is different from the tag autocompletion in the search box on https://publiclab.org/tags, which is from this segment of code.

As to 5) i want to cautiously say the only other place we're using this code is on https://publiclab.org/search/tags

I think that means we could insert the exact match at the top of the list in this deeper API code:

https://github.com/publiclab/plots2/blob/158fadc6ed12b66bd0b17f65a134cef59b81cfee/app/services/search_service.rb#L79-L91

I'd like also to write a functional test for this to confirm that the top match is the exact match. I think this would be based on this test, and follow it, using an entire word like "spectrometer":

https://github.com/publiclab/plots2/blob/3a05ae2d547c71d5a7d173741586397947fcbc00/test/functional/tag_controller_test.rb#L435-L440

This is great because for the partial match we'd still see this ordering:

https://github.com/publiclab/plots2/blob/3a05ae2d547c71d5a7d173741586397947fcbc00/test/functional/tag_controller_test.rb#L439

But in the exact match we'd see items 1 and 2 swap places. That should be a great and specific test.

I want to propose adding this to the Tagging project for our combined Outreachy and GSoC teams! cc @17sushmita @Manasa2850 (more soon on how your project plans may overlap! 🎉)

Thanks so much for building this issue out with all these details @jywarren ! 😄