Search and Ye shall find

Broken link? Feature request? Anything related to the Spectrum Computing website here.
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PeterJ
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Search and Ye shall find

Post by PeterJ »

Tonight we are unveiling our new and improved search facility.

Image

Previously the search at the top of the home page only looked for titles, but now it will search through titles, authors and publishers.

So, regardless if you enter Exolon, Grigoriy Klimenko or Hewson you will get results.

Let us know what you think, or if you have any issues.

Just a reminder, that we also have the advanced search for those more specific multi-field searches.
Wall_Axe
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Re: Search and Ye shall find

Post by Wall_Axe »

in advanced search could you do 'search for available titles' and an option to just list all available games for download?
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PeterJ
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Re: Search and Ye shall find

Post by PeterJ »

[mention]Wall_Axe[/mention] When we increase our number of titles available for download we can certainly consider that.
richl
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Re: Search and Ye shall find

Post by richl »

Is there any way of just displaying an author's name (or list of authors that match a search) and then being able to see everything they're attached to? Currently search results just seem to spew out software titles... unless I'm doing something wrong? It's not ideal if you don't search for an exact name - e.g. searching for "Smith"!

I noticed that you can't click on names in the "Authors" section for individual entries either so I'm guessing it sort of ties in with the above. It's one of the things that unfortunately keeps me popping back to that "other site" from time to time.
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PeterJ
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Re: Search and Ye shall find

Post by PeterJ »

richl wrote: Thu Dec 21, 2017 8:11 pm Is there any way of just displaying an author's name (or list of authors that match a search) and then being able to see everything they're attached to? Currently search results just seem to spew out software titles... unless I'm doing something wrong? It's not ideal if you don't search for an exact name - e.g. searching for "Smith"!

I noticed that you can't click on names in the "Authors" section for individual entries either so I'm guessing it sort of ties in with the above. It's one of the things that unfortunately keeps me popping back to that "other site" from time to time.
The search will display results of all titles authored anyone with 'Smith' in their name. So the first result is 'Abyss' written by 'J.P.W. Smith'. Now if you scroll down the page to the purple coloured 'Authors' section and click on the authors name, you will see a list of games that author was involved in. That one is not a great example as he only created one game, but hopefully you get the idea.
richl
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Re: Search and Ye shall find

Post by richl »

Ah, right. I think I'd seen the purple authors section before but forgot when doing a quick test search. I think the fact that you can click on other things towards the top - such as release year, publisher etc - where the author/s is/are mentioned (but aren't clickable) threw me off a bit.

I'd still like to be able to just produce a list of authors that match a particular search, however (as mentioned, that other site can do that). At the moment if I had a vague idea of someone's name I'd need to click on several titles until I found one that was by the correct author I was looking for and only then could I click on their name to see the rest of the titles that they're linked to. If I'm still being stupid and there's already an easier way of doing that then please let me know :)
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PeterJ
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Re: Search and Ye shall find

Post by PeterJ »

My immediate thought was to consider adding authors to the search result, but then this would increase the length of the search results which I wouldn't want to do. Especially on mobile. We include pictures in results, which we went for instead of loads of text.

I will put this on our Google Docs suggestions pile for future consideration.

The non-clickable authors in the general section is down to me. Sorry!
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kolbeck
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Re: Search and Ye shall find

Post by kolbeck »

On ZXInfo.dk - auto suggestion only looks for titles, even that the result also will search author and publisher.

For authors you could try http://zxinfo.dk/graph
Try typing 'Matthew s' or 'David Th' just to give you an idea of how it can be done.

I do consider merging these two, and will probaly put in a small icon in the suggestion list - so its easy to see if author or game title are suggested.

/Thomas
https://api.zxinfo.dk/v3/ - ZXDB API for developers
zxinfo-file-browser - Cross platform app to manage your files
https://zxinfo.dk - another ZXDB frontend
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PeterJ
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Re: Search and Ye shall find

Post by PeterJ »

kolbeck wrote: Thu Dec 21, 2017 11:41 pm On ZXInfo.dk - auto suggestion only looks for titles, even that the result also will search author and publisher.

For authors you could try http://zxinfo.dk/graph
Try typing 'Matthew s' or 'David Th' just to give you an idea of how it can be done.

I do consider merging these two, and will probaly put in a small icon in the suggestion list - so its easy to see if author or game title are suggested.

/Thomas
Very nicely presented [mention]kolbeck[/mention]
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PeterJ
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Re: Search and Ye shall find

Post by PeterJ »

richl wrote: Thu Dec 21, 2017 9:01 pm Ah, right. I think I'd seen the purple authors section before but forgot when doing a quick test search. I think the fact that you can click on other things towards the top - such as release year, publisher etc - where the author/s is/are mentioned (but aren't clickable) threw me off a bit.

I'd still like to be able to just produce a list of authors that match a particular search, however (as mentioned, that other site can do that). At the moment if I had a vague idea of someone's name I'd need to click on several titles until I found one that was by the correct author I was looking for and only then could I click on their name to see the rest of the titles that they're linked to. If I'm still being stupid and there's already an easier way of doing that then please let me know :)
OK [mention]richl[/mention] , so now if you search for 'Smith' in the quick search box at the bottom of the page of results you will see names of all the authors and publishers who match that search too.

Image

The only issue is that these results appear at the bottom of each page. We can sort that though.
richl
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Re: Search and Ye shall find

Post by richl »

That's really handy - cheers! :)
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