lunakim•28d agoMost Upvoted

Visited the library downtown and noticed how their website search totally broke my flow

I went to the main branch on 5th street yesterday to grab a book on Python basics, and I spent like 10 minutes just trying to find it on their online catalog from my phone. The search kept giving me results from 2012 or stuff that wasn't even in the building anymore. Made me realize how much I take a clean search function for granted when I'm coding my own little projects. Has anyone else tried building a search feature and totally messed it up at first?

3 comments

3 Comments

ruby45028d ago

Used to think search was the easy part of any project. Then I tried to build one for my recipe collection and it was a total disaster - returned stuff that didn't exist and ignored what was actually there. This conversation made me realize I completely underestimated how much thought goes into making search actually work.

olivia_harris1928d ago

Built a search for my movie collection once and it ranked my cat photo collection higher than any actual film.

the_ray28d ago

Oh man, I feel this so hard. I spent a weekend trying to fix a search for my bookmarks and it was basically just throwing spaghetti at the wall. The thing that finally helped me was treating it less like a magic box and more like a structured problem - you know, thinking about what people actually type versus what the data looks like. You gotta tweak it for stuff like misspellings (like "recepie" instead of "recipe") and also make sure your index is actually matching on the right fields, not just the title. It's a grind but once you get it acting right, it's honestly so satisfying.