PDB Search engine work this morning

This morning I took the PDB search engine completely apart and rebuilt it from the ground up. Those of you who were having trouble with the search engine, please try it this morning and let me know how it works out for you. I'm hoping that it works well!

dave

Dave--I just did some searches for things that it had trouble coming up with before (4+ pages of results previously) now they come at as the sole result or in the top 2 or 3!! I like it!!! I'm sure there will be better testers along soon. Brenda

Lookin' good so far!!!! (Love, love love the "did you mean"...)

Working MUCH better Dave! Used a number of searches that in its prior life the search engine couldn't find or it took several steps to get to.

The only one that I found so far that is still problematic is "Euphorbia" as the keyword. It seems to be coming up with the entire family of 240 entries (Euphorbiaceae), but when I search using the Family name of Euphorbiaceae the system comes up with 238 entries. I didn't check each entry to see what the odd two out were. :-)

Thanks for the feedback.

Happenstance: I made a change based on your report and I think it's working better now. Please try your search again and see what you think.

dave

Ya got it Dave! Thanks!

(She's not going to be greedy, she says to herself.....but at some point is there a way to alphabetize the returns for a search? I think Palm Bob also mentioned this as a need)

Right now the results are returned like Google, where the most relevant results are returned first. Changing it to be alphabetical... would require a fundamental change to the search engine. Maybe one day, but not soon. My biggest priority is getting it to return the best results that the searcher was looking for.

dave

excellent! a big improvement. Thanx!

Cheri'

Not complaining, however when asking for "cheeseweed", 'Malvella leprosa' comes up, but not 'Malva parviflora'.

Ummmm, well I think the reason is because in the M. parviflora entry, Cheeseweed was spelled without an "h" http://plantsdatabase.com/go/64033/index.html (I'll leave it up until you get a chance to see it for yourself, and then I'll edit it.)

Dave, edited to say that when I searched for parviflora, the Malva entry didn't come up: http://plantsdatabase.com/search.php?search_text=parviflora&submit=Search but when I searched for Malva parviflora, it was among the results: http://plantsdatabase.com/search.php?search_text=Malva+parviflora&Search=Search


This message was edited Mar 29, 2004 10:50 PM

Gee, is my face red! And I am a cheese lover from way back.
Thanks for catching that.

oops, search mode seems to be slipping a bit again... searched for Euphorbia balsamifera- I know it's there... but didn't show up... a variety of it did, though.

that's fixed now, too. Thanks.