Creator Discovery & Search — Relevance, Indexes, Safe Public DTOs (Hard)

[aji70]

Task: Creator Discovery & Search — Relevance, Indexes, Safe Public DTOs (Hard)

Overview

Discover needs a real search API. Ship indexed, ranked-ish discovery with filters, featured stub, strict public DTOs (no PII), and abuse-resistant pagination — not ILIKE %q% full scans without indexes/docs.

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Scope (must all ship)

Endpoints

• GET /api/v1/creators/search?q&category&page&limit&sort
• GET /api/v1/creators/featured?limit — deterministic stub (recently onboarded / manual flag)
• Public only; no auth required

Query behavior

• Match handle prefix + displayName (document ranking: exact handle > prefix > displayName)
• Category filter
• Exclude non-onboarded / deleted users
• sort: relevance | newest | popular (popular may stub via subscriberCount if available)
• Empty q returns paginated onboarded catalog

Performance

• Add DB indexes supporting prefix search (e.g. LOWER(handle) text_pattern_ops / trigram if extension OK — document choice)
• Cap q length; sanitize %/_ wildcards
• Limit max page size

DTO security

• Public creator card: handle, displayName, bio excerpt, avatar, category, counts — never email/password/tokens

Testing (≥12)

• Prefix handle match
• Category filter
• Non-onboarded excluded
• Empty q pagination
• Featured limit
• Wildcard injection doesn’t explode results
• PII absent from response (assert keys)
• sort newest
• Invalid category 400 or empty (document)

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Deliverables

• CreatorSearchService, indexes/migration, Swagger, docs/creator-search.md, ≥12 tests

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Acceptance Criteria

• Search + featured correct and PII-safe
• Indexes/docs for scale
• Standard pagination envelope
• CI green

Out of scope

• Elasticsearch/OpenSearch cluster
• Personalized recommendations