For now the intent was to provide an autocomplete, and that's done and working.Einar Saukas wrote: ↑Sat Jul 20, 2019 11:36 pm ...I suspect this discussion has been too abstract for most users. It's hard for anyone to evaluate what's the best interface without actually trying it.
I suggest you implement your idea in your alternate page (or even replace the main page), afterwards write a post describing the changes and asking for feedback.
I will probably change it a bit, to allow something like 40 entries, but just show 10, but then allow to scroll to see the remaining 30.
To review the way how search is being done, I need to first understand the data and relation between the several tables involved, in more detail.
In particular, how other info is kept in the labels table.
Some extra coments below.
Yes I assume all that, behind what I mentioned as user intent.Einar Saukas wrote: ↑Sat Jul 20, 2019 12:05 am ...No. I understood exactly what you meant. There's no need to discuss it technically, because the problem is not technical. We just happen to have different ideas for the intended behavior.
You assume that users searching for "cadáv" are only interested in words containing this accent. I assume they want "Cadàveriön" but didn't memorize the exact spelling.
You assume that users searching for "off-road" are only interested in words containing this hyphen. I assume they want all off road games regardless of spelling.
You assume that users searching for "night rally" don't want to see "Nightmare Rally" in the list of results. I assume they do.
Basically you assume most users will bother to learn the nuances of using capital letters or not, using punctuation or not, etc. I assume they just want to find a game with minimum effort.
They can still search exactly like you describe, just by not using any case or accent.
You can call that a "nuance" they will have to learn. I have no problem with that.
The thing is, if they do not want to mach every single "ana" in the search topic, but just want to get the ones that match "aña" they can, and will not have FALSE positives.
With the current solution they can't, it's case insensitive and accent insensitive all the way.
Having a choice for refining the search, seems an improvement or win to me, but that might not be the opinion of the majority.
Ideally we would have a search engine, and someone to maintain it, but we don't.
OK, I understand that it involves some effort, but that's the only feasible (NON FALSE positives) way to do it, using only SQL.Einar Saukas wrote: ↑Sat Jul 20, 2019 12:05 am ...
And that's exactly what I wanted to avoid, because maintaining a list of alternative names would be a PITA.
I believe I explained that it should be some other table, and not the "aliases" table, since that has a specific release context.Einar Saukas wrote: ↑Sat Jul 20, 2019 12:05 amNo, I don't. The "aliases" table contains alternative official names for the same game. It doesn't make sense to add other titles to this table that a game never had, just to help searches.
A table specific for this purpose, like "title_synonyms" or similar.
i.e. specific tables and data created for handling searching, like the search_by_* tables already are.
OK, I just believe we can improve on the current solution.Einar Saukas wrote: ↑Sat Jul 20, 2019 12:05 amI know. False positives is the price to pay for easier, broader searches. I think that's a good tradeoff.
I understand that, but by creating the search_by_* tables, aren't you actually already doing something similar ?
Surely not as involved as it could be, but a start of what a typical "search index" is.
I searched for "Electra" and it finds it, but searching for "electra" fails to find it, curious!Einar Saukas wrote: ↑Sat Jul 20, 2019 12:05 am ...
Your proposal wouldn't be able to find "Electra 9000", for instance. It's the title of a game re-released by Alternative, probably better known than the original title from the first K'Soft release.
Maybe I missed something.
Are you referring to the fact, that current quick search query, doesn't include "labels" alone (without joining to authors or publishers) ?
If that's the case, I was just following the tip on the field "Search by Title, Author, Publisher".
Maybe we should include the "labels" individually too.
But to be fair, I still haven't grasped the "labels" table completely, because it seems a bit messy to have some of it related with other tables, giving it context (like authors or publishers), but part of it, is neither of those, and has not relation with any other extra context giving table.
I find it a bit odd, although I do understand that this is probably related with legacy data.
Again, thank you for your feedback.
I do appreciate it.