BigOven

When I first startup Big Oven it comes up with my recipes on the left and a home page greeting saying "Welcome Qwertz, you have "x" medals you can hand out", etc and an empty search box with a title "find recipe named".

 I was looking for "Philippines". Not realizing that every letter I typed was being echoed onscreen under "This is just a quick sample of what we've got. Search for:" (I type by looking at the keyboard and not at the screen - sorry!), I continued to type the word "Philippines" (with an "s"). When I looked up I saw a list quickly pop onscreen and then immediately disappear and I was back to my welcome screen with "Philippines" in the search box.

 Repeating the procedure I slowly typed "Philippine" and a list of recipes came up. Then when I hit the "s" all disappeared - this was the quick glimpse I had.

 Now, A normal search (like in Google) would extract the word "Philippine" (no "s" on the word) from my query and have given me the listing the same as if I had typed "Philippines" (with an "s"). Your program does not do this. It is very frustrating as one has to know the "exact" keyword.

John

Yes, it's true that our archive does not use the same algorithm as Google.  Keywords that you enter must be entirely contained in the recipe themself somewhere (in tags, title, ingredients, etc.) 

The feature request you are making here is not trivial to engineer (include plurals, singular, etc. in searches), but there is hope that this will be addressed over the next year.  The back-end currently runs on SQL Server 2000.  Now, the very latest version of SQL Server, which is called SQL Server 2005, provides for a lot more flexible full text search options, and some time in the next year, we'll have a chance to address this.  

In the meantime, from within the software, many of the predefined keywords are available for your selection in the "More Options" dialog, which is available when you click "Find" on the toolbar.  Also, note that the search-as-you-type feature will only return the top 10 items -- to do a full search, use the "Find" button on the toolbar, or click the button after you type. 

(By the way, many of the comments you're making on the software belong more appropriately in the "Feature Requests" section of the board, thanks.)

Sorry, they were not "Feature Requests" but a query as to why the program did not do as I exected. I would be very pleased if you would implement them in another upgrade. Thanks. Still love the program but get confused sometimes by the abnormal behaviour.

OK, thanks, I guess it's simply a matter of perspective -- one man's bug is another man's feature request.  Since we know the program fairly well, it's pretty clear to us that dis-ambiguating all plurals and "forms of" search keywords is a significant amount of work not yet supported by the search.  We'll consider this over the coming year, particularly when we upgrade the server software that BigOven.com runs on.