Feedback 3.09

[zajonc-gugle]

Looks good to me. Here's a few things that have caught my attention.

• results are not sorted by how much they match the query. Searching for "egg" brings up Chocalate Cake as the first result, with scrambled eggs at the very bottom. I'd expect scrambled eggs to be the first result. Perhaps we could add some weights when performing a search and prefer results with a match in the title?
  • same thing when searching specifically for "scrambled eggs". Maybe if a given result matches more keywords, we could prefer it over other results?
• this may be a bit more tricky, but: we seem to look for an exact string match. As a result, we don't quite support plural forms if a recipe uses a singular form. For example, compare results of searching for "strawberry" vs "strawberries".
  There's multiple ways to solve this problem (including just ignoring it :) ):
  • we could introduce some fancy mechanism of turning singular verbs into plural forms (and vice versa)
  • we could introduce fuzzy searching
  • we could limit our search algorithm to support a few keywords and try to handle multiple forms of each keyword
    Either way, this may turn out to be a bit more tricky than it seems at first, so let's maybe not prioritize it yet.
• "weird" queries - perhaps we could sanitize the queries and filter out (or handle them differently) cornes cases, such as:
  • empty strings
  • single letters
  • whitespace strings
    Same as above, I wouldn't prioritize this. The app works and handles the inputs, so it's not big of a deal. If we had more time to polish the app, then this would be something to take into account.

[polinasand]

Additional feedback from users:

• it would be nice to add some samples of search request under the request bar ("for example: sweet cookies")
• add about article/page/message or something that helps user during the first use
• add prioritized search or search like +milk -eggs (find everything with eggs but without milk)
• add view for not found page
• limit the input length in search bar