Additional Functionality
The biggest change in this update is adding the search condition ‘Contains Word’ for the Title and Meta Description searches. I ran into a problem when I was searching for ‘seo’ or (Search Engine Optimization). So I ran a ‘Title’ and a ‘Meta Description’ search against ‘seo’ with a condition of ‘Contains’ – This brought back a bunch of results for ‘Seoul’ or ‘Seoul Korea.’ That is somewhat of a problem as that’s not what I’m looking for. However the problem is easily solved as a ‘Contains Word’ condition is now in place. So the SQL will now do the following:
- Contains: Select count(*) from Table where title ilike ‘%seo%’
- Contains Word: Select count(*) from Table where title ilike ‘% seo %’
As you can see the ‘Contains Word’ condition will add white space around the search variable. This new bit of code will allow you much greater control over how you tune the search engine to get the results to want. I’m sure I’ll be adding more conditions like this as I review the app, use it and remember conversations I’ve had with clients that are trying to find various bit of information.
Another bit of new functionality is pointed at the parsing layer. Each URL is parsed and the page is read to retrieve the title and the meta description. Some pages will refuse to be read. This results in an ‘ERROR: The request could not be satisfied’ being returned from the parse request. This string was being stored as the name. This is not desirable functionality as the error message doesn’t give value to the user. This as been corrected by just adding the last bit of the address as the name. So https://espn.com/nfl/tom-brady-is-the-greatest-ever/ will display as tom-brady-is-the-greatest-ever if the URL fails to parse. This is a step in the right direction. Eventually I’ll write some code to retry these failed URLs.
Visualizes the results of a parsing error. That’s a Wrap!
I hope the code updates and additional functionality make the Unfiltered Search Engine easier to use. If you see anything that you would like to see added please drop me a email at: blog@unfiltered.me – I’m always open to new processes and ideas to make search more intelligent and easier to use.
This update is being pushed to the app stores today and will be available over the upcoming week.
As always happy searching!
