Ok. We know that Member Search here is pretty useless. Unless you know the EXACT username, it doesn't show you anything :)

So how can we make it better? What do people normally do to search? What are people looking for? Want to find usernames? Or normal names? Or search by ratings? Or by location? Or all? :)

I'm most interested in the username/name search. It is REALLY painful to do a search like "and" and then get results like "andy", "randy", "hand". How painful? Like bring-the-site-down painful. We can do it where you search for "and" and get "andy", "andrew", "andover". But not just anywhere in the name.  

Basically, how do you expect member search to perform? :)

would it be possible to us ethe standard partial search arguments where

? = any single character and * = any block of characters

so

?andy would return mandy, sandy, dandy etc.

Partial name search with all those approximating to the entry being returned would be great.

The only search we needed was the one that worked OK until this week, we put in part of the name, for instance all our group members added (COT) to there name (their account name, not their screen name) and this gave us a list of members when we searched in the View Players screen, then we could sort in a number of ways, ratings, alpha etc, and this was great for what we wanted.

roundtuit wrote:

The only search we needed was the one that worked OK until this week, we put in part of the name, for instance all our group members added (COT) to there name (their account name, not their screen name) and this gave us a list of members when we searched in the View Players screen, then we could sort in a number of ways, ratings, alpha etc, and this was great for what we wanted.

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 I think it's been longer than that since it worked, but I do agree that when that search worked, I was happy with it.

erik wrote:I'm most interested in the username/name search. It is REALLY painful to do a search like "and" and then get results like "andy", "randy", "hand". How painful? Like bring-the-site-down painful. We can do it where you search for "and" and get "andy", "andrew", "andover". But not just anywhere in the name.

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 Hi Erik,

Don't think this is as bad as you think.  I have developed an efficient way to do this in the past.

A

We can do it where you search for "and" and get "andy", "andrew", "andover".

 

I would prefer that method myself.  Being able to narrow it down further by a rating range or location would be a nice thing to have.

I've got a good example, say you search Micheal_223 but it's really micheal225. It should say did you mean Micheal223. : )

rich wrote:

I think it for example, say you search Micheal_223 but it's really micheal225. It should say did you mean Micheal225. : )

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That would be nice!

In the case where no results are returned, It would be nice if the search script would automatically truncate the last character or two from the search string & then run the query again. So if you search for Micheal_227, It finds nothing, & then automatically resubmits the query for Micheal_22, which would return Micheal_223, Micheal_225, etc.

or at least a LIKE query with % at the end

Another big site I'm a member of uses the following solution.  Whenever you specify a search with a username as part of the search criteria, it first brings you to a screen with multiple radio buttons where it asks you to pick the user you meant (showing all the users that match your string).  For example if you entered to search for posts by user 'eternal', it would first ask you if you meant:

eternal21

eternalBliss

eternal2121

TimeEternal

Once you selected the user you meant, it would then show you proper search results.

I think if you could add a 'rating range' as a search parameter that would help. For example one could search by 'country' and by rating range (say 1500-1800) and that would narrow it down for the searcher!

I would like the search to predict lottery numbers.

First, I would add more search logic to Chessopedia search. Try to search for "Kasparov", it won't show up in the first place. I think we should fix it :D.

I agree it needs some overhauling. Today I wanted to search for someone with "roy" in the middle of their name from Germany and it was hard to do.

Idea #1: Support the * (wildard) operator. This is a common development solution and should be familiar to expert searchers and computer users. It also means no GUI changes and is straightforward to convert into a regexp or SQL query.

  If I want to find Andy, I type in "Andy"

  If I want to find Andy or Andrew or Andover I type in "And*"

  If I want to find Andy or Handy Or Mandy I type in "*andy"

Idea #2: Add a dropdown box next to the textbox you fill in that defaults to "Exact match" but can be changed to "At the beginning", "At the end", or "Anywhere". If this clutters up the page too much you could add an Advanced Search page like Google and many other sites do. This option is more accessible but entails more web design work.

For my own site, I have a list that appears next to the text field that updates dynamically as the user types. The list contains some username suggestions based on the first X letters the user has typed in. The list keeps updating as the user types. For example, to search for "alekhinescat", let's say you start typing... after 3 characters have been typed, the list will start appearing. So, I type in "ale" and the list pops up containing the first 5 possible matches, e.g.:

alecguiness
aledrinker
alekhine
alekhinescat
alekhinexyz

I keep typing and the list will keep updating after each keystroke. e.g. I type the next two letters, so now I've typed out "alekh". The list will now look like this:

alekhine
alekhinescat
alekhinesxyz

And so on and so forth. At any time you can click on one of the usernames in the suggestion popup and it will then add that username to the text field. It's pretty slick and the whole thing is done using AJAX, which this site uses a lot of so it should be easy for the programmer(s) to implement. Facebook does a similar thing when you search for friends. Actually, I probably got the idea from Facebook but I don't remember now.

Of course, this doesn't help if you want to do a more general search, like searching part of somebody's username but that can be built in too. The idea of the list is that it's only a suggestion and the user doesn't HAVE to click on the suggestions that pop up.

Just an idea. :)

eternal21 wrote:

Another big site I'm a member of uses the following solution.  Whenever you specify a search with a username as part of the search criteria, it first brings you to a screen with multiple radio buttons where it asks you to pick the user you meant (showing all the users that match your string).  For example if you entered to search for posts by user 'eternal', it would first ask you if you meant:

eternal21

eternalBliss

eternal2121

TimeEternal

Once you selected the user you meant, it would then show you proper search results.

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 I would second this idea.  But even the old system (certainly older than a week) was good enough.  The "new" one is just about useless.  On another note, anonymity might be nice too.  A friend of mine told me that for some reason another player contacted all of her opponents to warn them about her.  Such immature gossip would not be possible if, for example, the game history of a given player were available to their friends only, and not universally.

Evil_Homer wrote:

roundtuit wrote:

The only search we needed was the one that worked OK until this week, we put in part of the name, for instance all our group members added (COT) to there name (their account name, not their screen name) and this gave us a list of members when we searched in the View Players screen, then we could sort in a number of ways, ratings, alpha etc, and this was great for what we wanted.

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 I think it's been longer than that since it worked, but I do agree that when that search worked, I was happy with it.

The search I am talking about was through View Players in the Play Chess box on the Online Chess page (top right hand corner) and was base on your Account name, not your screen name (which you can't add to) and not the one through the Members Menu dropdown, which I agree stopped working a long time ago, the view player search was working until last week.

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why would you search for somebody if you didnt know thier exact name? surely the searching by rating, country, age, and a combination of all 3 is much more usefull.? for example i would like to be able to search for all the players here that live within 50 miles of me and are over 30? i might know a few of them :-))

if we had a search that could combine any of the following......location (maybe miles or kms from your own location could be added too), agee, rating, sex, it would be great!

I would just like the member search function to show me a list of matching usernames with the text I search. For example, I search "Patzer" and I would like to see all the username results with "Patzer" in it rather than just getting the one exact result of "Patzer".