Full text search/retrieval

[Sagitta_fr]

Hi, Ernie

I just want to make a suggestion to help your app become more user-friendly. (I just downloaded your app 2 days ago and I noticed that the version 2.6 will be released soon, however, I hope my suggestion will be considered when version 2.7 is in the making)

I absolutely love your app, it’s just that I find the search function a bit awkward to use. For example, you hit the two-card icon in the bottom-right, then you’re brought to the “Cards Edit” screen. Say, there’re 10,000 entries/cards in my deck (each entry is an English word and the deck is like a small dictionary) and if I key in “apt”, then the search results will contain “captivate”, “captive” or any entry that has “apt” in it. Well, eventually you will find the entry/card “apt” down the long list somewhere, but in this case, wouldn’t it be nicer if the word/card “apt” was placed at the top of the list just like the way it is with the other dictionary apps.

I’m not sure if the search processing technique of your app is called Full Text Retrieval - content based indexing (as opposed to word based indexing). I’m not saying it’s not useful but it’s not as efficient as other dictionary apps in terms of looking up a single entry.

With most dictionary apps, when you search for a word, for the same example, if you key in a letter “a”, then the dictionary literally starts with all the entries that BEGIN with “a”, and then if you continue to key in “p”, the dictionary will search for all the entries that begin with “a” and follow by “p”. Then, you key in “t”, the dictionary continues to narrow down the list of entries until the word “apt” is exactly shown at the top of list and followed by a series of similar entries that also begin with “apt” such as “aptamer” or “Aptera” and so forth. I hope I didn’t miss out on any feature/option of this app that will solve the problem I mentioned above.

Well, if I didn’t express myself coherently in English, please let me know, I’ll be more than happy to elaborate further on this.

Once again, I really appreciate your app and look forward to the upcoming version.

[Ernie]

You have a very good point, and I agree. My app does a full card search, and sorts by the first letter of the side, regardless of how "well" the match is. With a large dictionary, the card you want is often not at the top. I think an easy solution would be to give priority to cards that *start* with the search text and show these at the top in their own group.

Search "apt"
Results:

Begins with
apt
aptamer
Aptera
A
apple (no match with English - which is the current sort - but found match on side 2 in foreign language - my search returns a match on ANY side)
C
captivate
captive


What do you think of something like this?

At one point I thought of putting options in the search:
Match: 1) beginning 2) anywhere
Search: 1) side 1 2) side 2 3) all sides

I don't think I need an option to search beginning, as I can just prioritize these at the top as in my example. Finding cards with a match on a side you are not interested in may add to the "noise", but I want to keep the input simple.

After saying all this, I really just need to play around with this more to decide what to do. Something needs to get improved here.

Ernie

[radiator]

I am supportive of a search even if the fields are not in the list to be revealed. (maybe that is how it is already working)

Other programs have the ability to search on "contains" / "starts" / all - maybe some sort of simple buttons at the bottom of the search page where the user on the fly can change what they are searching for.

[Sagitta_fr]

Thanks for the reply, Ernie! It’s great that you have already thought about this at one point.

Radiator’s suggestion is very constructive – an ability to search on “contains”/ “starts”/ “all”. Wouldn’t that be just wonderful? With such an option at the bottom of the search page, users who have large decks in their apps would be able to find a particular card within 2 seconds.