Staff Blog: Search Improvements

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Search Improvements

On 03/17/2012 at 09:00 PM by Nick DiMola

If you haven't noticed already, I've made some improvements to the search. Instead of the old one where you had to actually search to bring something up, now it's an auto-complete. You should be seeing more relevant results for one and even beyond that, you should be able to refine your search to actually get what you're looking for.

In the case that you don't see what you need, just hit enter and our custom Google search will kick in and do its best to find what you're looking for. Oh, and as always, make sure you refresh if anything doesn't seem to be quite right.

Otherwise, enjoy and please let me know if you run into any issues!

Comments

Joaquim Mira Media Manager

03/18/2012 at 09:02 PM

Sweeet addition.

Michael117

03/19/2012 at 06:24 PM

Thank you Nick, I think it's a much needed improvement and I appreciate it a lot. I've used the search field a few times before and it wasn't very positive at all. The results were poor and the search inquiry had to be incredibly specific to even hope of bringing up the result you were looking for. You basically had to know what you were looking for, how to spell it, and not screw anything up.

Since I read this I've been doing various searches and trying to put it through its paces, and it's come out with flying colors so far Nick. I'm trying to throw it curveballs and search in vauge inquiries like "ff primer" and it will bring up exactly what I want to see "Final Fantasy 13-2 Primer". I could search for "harvest" and it'll bring up Kathrine's Tour De 64 Body Harvest 64 feature from 2010, which is what I had in mind. Based on results, I have no reason to believe it can't handle whatever I throw at it. Like any system it'll have flaws and somebody will find it someday, but I think it's amazing from what I've seen.

Nick DiMola Director

03/20/2012 at 09:11 AM

Awesome, glad to hear you're digging the improvements! If you do happen to run into any issues with it, please let me know. I'm sure there's some sort of flaw in there!

This one of those things that got backburnered for so long that I just kind of pretended it wasn't an issue. Then as I was spec-ing out a private message system, I needed some way for users to be able to select who they want to message without going to a user profile; auto-complete seemed like the best solution. After that I went and sought out a nice auto-complete jQuery module and sure enough, it was built into the framework already.

From there, I tried it out on some of our internal tools, found that it worked well and resurrected my old search project to much greater success than I had imagined.

The old search was just, like you said, crappy. It was very picky (and the current one kind of is too, it's just less noticeable) making it very hard to find what you're looking for. The instant feedback and new prioritization of results makes it much simpler to find exactly what you need.