Today we shipped some significant improvements to search on BigOven.com.
In addition to cleaning up / decluttering the presentation:
1) You can now view search results in either "detailed list" for "thumbnail" view. Look in the upper right corner of the search results page to toggle back and forth. At present writing, the thumbnail view shows 33 recipes at a time in a 3-column layout, and the "detail" view shows 10 recipes at a time. Many of you search by photo -- the "thumbnail" view is a terrific way to find a recipe by photo. See for yourself by searching on something broad, like "cookies", and then click on the thumbnail-view-button in the upper right corner. Page through the results and you'll get the feel for just how useful this can be.
2) BigOven will show you, for any search result set, the number of recipes tagged "Salads", "Desserts", "Main Dish", Soup", etc. This works for your "Favorites" list too -- give it a try! Note that it relies upon the tag being assigned to the recipe in exactly the format shown in the tab (e.g., the tag BigOven is looking for is "Salads", not "Salad"), and our indexing happens every 2-3 hours on the site. We'd love your help in further categorizing the recipes -- simply click the "Add Tag..." button on any recipe page, and add any appropriate tags, or remove ones that are inappropriate.
This is a very quick way for you to narrow down just the recipe you're looking for.
3) BigOven will now prompt you on the search results page if you've done a common misspelling. E.g., type in "caserole" to the site and see what you get, below. You'll get a prompt asking "Did you mean casserole?". We have misspellings for several dozen common errors and will be adding more over time.
Some of you wonder what happened to the filter-by-ingredients dialog on the left hand side. This got very little use, and we're designing a new way to achieve this. We'll be adding (back) this filtering power and more as the weeks progress. But since the new search display was so much better than the old one that we wanted to ship it now.
TIP: Search results too big for your screen from within the desktop application? Simply press ctrl-w to toggle the "wide" mode.
Screenshots below.
DETAIL VIEW
THUMBNAIL VIEW -- CLICK ON THE UPPER RIGHT THUMBNAIL TOGGLE TO SEE IT
DID YOU MEAN?
