Search function

At one point I was curious where I could find other users. I guess finding other people and "making friends" etc might be sort of peripheral to the real uses of the site, and I see some links to profiles here and there, but then I found myself on some page and realized I didn't really know where to go to look for other users. Maybe there's some easy place I missed. Anyway, my solution was to search for "gill" or "deej", knowing I would find something...neither search came up with any results. esCANdalo!!

I'll second that. I have been trying to search for products I use so I can post reviews of them. I thought of Trader Joe's "Next to Godliness" dishwashing liquid. When I put in next to godliness, I got almost three thousand completely unrelated results from all over the place.

I'm guessing at least part of the problem is that the default is for it to search for any page that has any of those words... I'd recommend changing it so it at least defaults to searching for all the search terms that are entered, OR changing it so people can select whether they want to search for any terms, all terms, or search as a phrase.

I'll add that of course as a web geek I know that the site owners must have their hands full maintaining the site, using it themselves, and getting the word out. BUT at the same time, as a new user, I have tons of other social media sites that I'd like to be involved in and limited time to use them all, so every new site gets probably more of a critical look-over from me than it deserves. I love Huddler's purpose and the supportive community I have seen here (in, you know, the few minutes I've been using it) but I am surprised that the first problem with the search function was posted in February and there aren't any responses from the site owners! And it's clearly not fixed. I don't demand both, but one or the other would double my love for the site :)

Thanks for your feedback, Oakling.  We're definitely working on the search functionality.  I'll ask our engineers about the progress and get back to you with more details by tomorrow!

Oakling - thanks again for the call to action. To be clear, when Brent posted back in the day, we hadn't launched yet and search was just plain broken - we've fixed that, but your issue is a great point. The problem was that we didn't have any Trader Joe's products or anything including the words "Next to Godliness" which is what you see if you search with quotations. Instead we returned all the results including any of the words, including just the word "to." Not exactly helpful.

We'll work on filtering out those types of results, but also, we now have the TJ's dish soap in the system. I couldn't find pictures of them anywhere, so I swung by and snapped a few this evening.

TJ's Next to Godliness Dish Soap

TJ's Next to Godliness Auto Dish Soap

Enjoy!

dan

One issue I've also found is that when searching for users, you have to get their ID exactly right.  So for example if I were trying to find 'oakling', but could only remember that the name started with 'oak', I'd be out of luck, because the user search feature doesn't work with partial names.  That might be worth tweaking sometime.