Search functions

[+stone-cacher]

Hello, there are some posts about "search functions which do not find the right results".

I have the same problems and some more (at least I'm afraid!).

 

The part "Locate the nearest geocaches in your area..." is not usable outside the United States. At least I've not been able to find something in a certain city in Germany with these options. Maybe somebody can tell me how to find some caches in, let's say "Krefeld"?

 

The part "Latitude Longitude Search" is working fine - if, yes if, you know the coordindates of the place you're looking for. But in that case it works fine.

 

The part "Other Search Options" is very nice if you search by "GC code", "Found by" or "Hidden by". But it is unusable for the "Cache Starts with" option!

In the past (long, long time ago) this option was able to search for "parts of a string within the title". This was a good way to find caches even though you do not know the "complete" or "correct" name. E. g. searching for the word "challenge" would give back a lot of challenge caches around your place which have "challenge" in their name but not at the beginning! Or if you search for "Krefeld" you will find caches like "Ein Cache in Krefeld" or "Suche krefelder Dosen" or something like that. This option could replace a "search by city" in countries out of the US because almost every city has at least one cache with the city name in its title.

 

I have read that this "option" was removed because of "performance issues". But to be honest: I don't understand that! Why should such a basic search function slow down any good database? Even if there are more than 2 million cache titles to be indexed it would be easy for "normal" databases to retrieve a result with search patterns and regular expressions within milliseconds.

 

Please give us back a real search function and forget about the "Starts with" option.

The existing one is useless if you search for caches you don't know the exact title and to search for caches in unknown areas.

Of course it would even be better to search for "keywords" within the body of the cache description. But I'm not going so far with my request to improve the "Search function".

 

Still hoping to get positive feedback on this post... Stone-Cacher

[+DanPan]

Try out the wildsearch on Project-GC.com.

 

This is an advanced search method created by Project-GC.

You can search for a cache using most of the attributes of it.

The attributes that are indexed are: GC Code, Cache name, Type, Size, Country/Region/County and the Cache owners name.

Either search by complete words or add an asterix (*) in the start and/or end.

 

Example 1: sweden unknown *izz* norrk* would return the cache Dagens Pizza (GC38V41)

Example 2: Chall* Germany would return all Challenge caches in Germany.

 

Example 3: All challenge caches in Krefeld http://project-gc.com/?wildsearch=challenge%20Krefeld

Edited December 25, 2013 by DanPan

[jholly]

Please give us back a real search function and forget about the "Starts with" option.

That functionality will be restored when the Guinea pig project is complete. There is a long standing project to replace the hamsters with Guinea pigs so the servers have more power. Unfortunate it has been delayed by because of legal issues with the ASPCSA. There seems to be a problem training the Guinea pigs to run in the hamster wheels.

[Keystone]

The search functionality was changed in April 2013 for reasons of site performance. Here is the explanation posted at that time by Moun10Bike in response to complaints similar to yours:

 

The performance improvement was primarily a reduction of database load. Before this change, we were routinely hitting max CPU load on the weekends, causing many site functions to fail and leading to overall slowness. Since this change was implemented, we have been maxing out around 30% load.

 

You might think it odd that such a simple search function had such an effect on performance, and we do too - to the point that we think this feature was in some way being abused (intentionally or unintentionally) by some third party out there. In any case, we had to make the change in order to ensure that the site continues to operate.

 

We know we need better search tools, and see this as a temporary band-aid until we can implement them.

[+ecanderson]

Maybe somebody can tell me how to find some caches in, let's say "Krefeld"?

??? I used the search term "Krefeld, DE" and it came up with the town of Krefeld and a ton of caches.

 

The list starts with these:

 

Nerds Forever, GC3FEJC

Ist das Kunst oder kann das weg?, GC3NDV2

 

Krefelder Fassaden, GC31HXQ

 

 

[+stone-cacher]

I used the search term "Krefeld, DE" and it came up with the town of Krefeld and a ton of caches.

 

It's funny, but I tried almost the same (without ", DE") and it did not give any results.

Now, trying again, with ", DE" (end even without) it does deliver some caches in the city I enter.

No idea why it did not do this on my other tries.

Thank you because this is an improvement for me (even it it might only be an upgrade of knowledge in "How to search?" ).

 

... but still: Searching for "Challenges" in my area does not work in this way.

 

So let's hope that Groundspeak finds a solution to (re-)implement a "real" search for substrings in the title.

 

Thank you for your replies and have a happy new year 2014...

Edited December 31, 2013 by stone-cacher

[+NYPaddleCacher]

I used the search term "Krefeld, DE" and it came up with the town of Krefeld and a ton of caches.

 

It's funny, but I tried almost the same (without ", DE") and it did not give any results.

Now, trying again, with ", DE" (end even without) it does deliver some caches in the city I enter.

No idea why it did not do this on my other tries.

Thank you because this is an improvement for me (even it it might only be an upgrade of knowledge in "How to search?" ).

 

... but still: Searching for "Challenges" in my area does not work in this way.

 

That's because those are two completely different types of "searches".

 

In the "Krefeld, DE" search, the site is just taking that string, sending it to an external geocoding service, and then *if* it gets back a set of long/coordinates, it uses those coordinates to search it's own database and return a list of caches within ascending proximity to those coordinates.

 

The "Challenges" search is a keyword search of the GS database (I'm guessing that it just searches the cache title field), and because there are no lat/long coordinates provided the results are no ordered. Personally, I'd like to see the keyword search requires that the users home location be set, and then use that for ordering the results.

 

 

 

[+paleolith]

The search functionality was changed in April 2013 for reasons of site performance. Here is the explanation posted at that time by Moun10Bike in response to complaints similar to yours:

 

We know we need better search tools, and see this as a temporary band-aid until we can implement them.

 

So how long do we have to wait for the permanent band-aid? I'm surprised there hasn't been more outcry about this. I just searched for a cache I'd visited recently and had trouble finding it because I forgot the name had "The" at the beginning.

 

I've been programming since 1967, and I totally understand the performance issue of doing a full string search on all titles. However, I also understand database indexing, in particular what used to be called an "inverted file". A true keyword search would mean "find names which contain words that start with all of the keywords in the search". Although this sounds more complex, it's easy to do with indexing, and the site performance would be excellent. Databases did this very well forty years ago with less processing power than my wristwatch has today.

 

Please raise the priority of this. Removing capabilities that we (premium members!) used is very unfriendly.

 

Edward