[CGI] More intelligent search [tracked]

analogued2 · Post by **analogued2** » Sun May 09, 2004 9:38 pm

At the moment the search mechanism is pretty dumb. For example: search for night galactic and you will get 0 results; search for night on the galactic and you will be redirected to the correct movie entry. The script seems to search for the exact phrase you entered not for the words you entered.

Skywalka · Post by **Skywalka** » Sun May 09, 2004 11:53 pm

just search for galactic and you're done.

And I would never call anything EXP did "dumb". Call it "creative" or whatever, but not "dumb". That's a bit harsh.

sothis · Post by **sothis** » Mon May 10, 2004 6:27 am

it isn't "dumb".. its using what most people use.. the "like" keyword for sql. you could always give the more advanced sql queries, since it would save exp time. i know i sure as hell wouldn't want to waste all that time trying to rewrite google's engine.

analogued · Post by **analogued** » Mon May 10, 2004 11:05 am

Skywalka wrote: And I would never call anything EXP did "dumb". Call it "creative" or whatever, but not "dumb". That's a bit harsh.

Just to make this clear: it was not meant as an insult or anything like that. I was just trying to describe the way the search mechanism works (i.e: in a non-standard way). When someone enters a few words in any search engine it expects to get a list of pages containing those terms, not a list of pages containing the exact phrase.

The example I gave was just that, an example. In practice, more complicated situation may arise. I can't give you any examples at the moment because AniDB has just gone into maintenance mode.

Please don't take this for more than it actually is: a feature request. It was certainlly not meant as an insult, and I didn't even realise someone may take this the wrong way until you posted your reply.

As for how hard this would be to implement, I didn't know, but I considered it to be a good feature request. I certainly don't want to add more useless work for EXP. If he consideres this to be much too complicated or not worth it, then so be it.... but unless I posted this I would have never known

kidan · Post by **kidan** » Mon May 10, 2004 11:31 pm

Isn't it possible to ad an wildcard-charakter in the query?

I think for SQL it's % so night%galactic finds your anime.

Post by **exp** » Tue May 11, 2004 8:03 pm

well,

i guess this comes down to a question of ones personal preferences.
i could of course auto-replace any space in the input with a %.
but whenever i really want to search that way i usually enter a % manually.

the real feature request should be another one though.
even after replacing all spaces with % it will still only find animes which have the words in that exact order in their title.
i.e. galactic&night would currently give you no results.

BYe!
EXP

analogued · Post by **analogued** » Tue May 11, 2004 10:18 pm

exp wrote:the real feature request should be another one though.
even after replacing all spaces with % it will still only find animes which have the words in that exact order in their title.
i.e. galactic&night would currently give you no results.

That's exactly what I meant in my original feature request.... I should have switched the words around to make it more clear (galactic night instead of night galactic). Basically, what I was asking was that AniDB behave in a standard way (e.g. the same as any search engine: Google, the search feature of phpBB, etc. [NOTE: to make this clear: I meant the "Search for all terms" option of phpBB] - all these search for the individual words by default not for the phrase).

The way the search feature of AniDB works right now can be a bit misleading. I know I was fooled at first by it, and actually thought that it searched for the individual words. Other new users may face the same problems.

In closing I would just like to say that this is by no means as pressing as other matters and, if nothing comes out of this feature request, it won't be that big of a deal. I just thought that this would be more useful than searching for the exact phrase as you don't always know all the words in an anime title or the order they are in, so AniDB may actually not return any results when in reality the anime is in the database.