Search facility

Am I right in assuming that the search facility only searches within the main body of the submitted experiences? For example, I searched recently for 'plainchant', which returned no sources. But browsing by 'music' revealed an experience where the type of music was listed as plainchant. This seems to be a bit misleading - if I'd just searched, without browsing, I'd have assumed there was no experience of listening to plainchant currently in the database.

Best wishes

Lucy

Hi Lucy - sorry to be slow to reply - I missed this one. The search facility, although it's still a work in progress, should be searching on all fields, not just the main body. I just did your 'plainchant' search (i.e., not browsing but entering 'plainchant' in the search box) and it brought up the Eric Gill experience. I'm not sure how to explain what happened when you tried it - if it happens again, let me know and I'll ask Alessandro to look into it.

Best,
Helen

Dear Lucy,

Thank You for your feedback. We are indeed tweaking search indices and what they look into, however, search and browse facilities in general are something we're investigating improvements upon in the short term.

Best

Alessandro

Hi again,

we are experimenting with a few advanced search features, including:

  • Facets for filtering the results of a keyword search
  • Expanding the range of keyword search

To continue on the "plainchant" example, both currently expected results should be returned:

http://led.kmi.open.ac.uk/search/lexp/plainchant/

This is all quite experimental and not fully into production yet. Range expansion was only applied to approved items up to 11/7/2014: if you enter new experiences, the system will only pick up terms from their evidence text until we rebuild the index (which will be scheduled to happen regularly once it proves effective and efficient enough in the coming days).