I like that the new search function is quicker and has a clearer interface. However, I would like to see which beers I already rated, this was really useful with the old search function.
It already does. Your rating text is below the beer entry, along with an extremely thin bar with rating and small font showing the number. I think they just need to make it more visible? And probably hide the rating text because I don’t think we really need to see that in our search results?
It wasn’t showing on my phone, but that could be an issue with how the web-version works on a smartphone. The old search function is back now, so I can’t look it up and check again.
It looks like it’s been changed drastically. And joet has ignored the huge majority of NO votes in the poll and gone ahead with the change nobody wanted.
Why is there no backlash against this? So many people voted NO, yet then joet goes ahead and does it anyway, no one complains? You all just accept it? Am I the only one who doesn’t think it’s ok to do this?
Phoenix is just a brand name of a third party search engine that website owners can implement into their own websites, so that they don’t have to worry about coding their own search. This is as much as a Luddite would need to know about it I think
In theory you shouldn’t need to change the way you search for beers, but it seems like you do, which is the issue we have here.
It’s free and open source. It seems to be decent and fairly powerful, but for a site like Ratebeer we really benefited from partial/fragmented searches returning the matches we want, especially on beer names that are hard to spell. So far the only upside I can see to using this is that searches like “Stone IPA” actually return relevant results now. I’m not convinced these trade-offs are really worth it though. Judging by the results of the recent poll, many of us, myself included, almost always did partial searches to quickly get to the beer we wanted to find. Now we have to be far more precise. Forcing your users to be more accurate in their typing may sound noble and would be fine if we lived in a perfect world, but we don’t, and in reality it doesn’t really work and only serves to annoy a large proportion of users.
A better option (probably) would have been to use Algolia’s search engine but it would be prohibitively expensive for Ratebeer as it’s intended for massive businesses (costs around $2500/month for a database of RB size).
Thanks for the explanation. Hopefully, despite any failings, an off-the-shelf search engine might free up some developer time to add the extra stats we’ve all been asking for - more countries split into regions, more colours for higher numbers of ratings and so on…
Unsurprisingly, some pages have the new search function being used, and others have the old search function.
I tried a couple “partial term” searches and it looks like it worked in each case… I won’t bash this until I’ve used it for awhile, in the short term it appears there’s a chance it’s an improvement.