Update: Improved Finder Results

November 11, 2010 22:11

Up and till now we've been using a temporary form of search results from the plant finder. As of today we have unveiled a few changes to massively improve them.

Firstly, similar (i.e. closely related plants) are now grouped together in the results. Rather than listing a number of similar plants in the results, you will now see text such as: '3 similar plants found show...'. Click the show link and you will see listing of these plants along with what makes them different.

Second we have added more search results per page and added 'pagination' to the bottom of the page (in other words links to further search results).

Third we have changed the search algorithm so it should be much faster. The old version was a very quick and dirty solution and was taking up to a second to return results, even with the small database we have at present. We will be monitoring performance of the new code closely.

And finally we have removed the number beside each category in the search part of the finder. Whilst this was an interesting feature it resulted in heavy usage of the database. This change will both improve page load times and clean up the page somewhat.