BigOven

 Please open the Big Oven program on your computer. Go to the "Home" page, if it does not open immediately when the program starts (click the house button).

 Type in "Greek" (no quotes) into the search box on the home page.

 It should give a list of Greek recipes. Mine shows 10 recipes.

At the bottom it says: This is just a quick sample of what we've got. Search for:'Greek'

I would assume this means you have more recipes to list, but when I click there I go to a listing of VIDEOS showing how to make Greek  Recipes.

 Is this supposed to happen? I would assume you have more than 10 recipes with Greek in them. The above line doesn't say searching for videos.

This is a feature, not a bug :-)

We've added relevant videos to the top of the search results.  Simply scroll down that page and you'll find a list of 250 Greek recipes.

OK, I've got a problem with search different than this one.

The search functions in the program Big Oven (Find) and on the "Home" page in the program (find recipe named) is very erratic and contradictory.

Here's an example. Type in "devils on horseback" into "find recipe named" and hit "Enter" - I get three recipe titles up. Now hit the back arrow (in the program) and the "find recipe named" is now blank (empty) and the three recipes are gone. I only got to see one. I would think the name could remain in the search box and the three recipes could remain so I could look  at the next one in line. So, I type "devils on horseback" again into the "find recipe named" and the three recipe titles come up.

Seeing a note under the recipes that says "This is just a quick sample of what we've got. Search for: devils on horseback" I click on that thinking more recipes will come up. The search pauses and says it searching 160,000+ recipes and then comes up with the statement in a yellow box "There are no recipes matching that specific search." That's crazy! You just showed me three!

So, hit return arrow and all of a sudden "devil's on horseback" is now showing in the "find recipe named" box. Oh great! I'll click on the gray "Search!" button - maybe that will get me more. Nope! Same searching 160,000 recipes and "There are no recipes matching that specific search."

OK, you told me once to use the "Find" search in the program. Let's switch to that. Search again for "devils on horseback" and click on BigOven.com Recipe Archive. and then OK. Same thing. No recipes found! How in the heck can you find three recipes and then not find them again in two separate searches? It makes no sense and makes searching very frustrating. One cannot trust the search to give consistent results, and if it comes up with no recipes, we don't know if it is a false result or not.

There are a couple things you are seeing that are by-design, because of performance optimization, but one other thing that we'll log as a bug to fix.

First the "Search as you Type" feature is very expensive, performance-wise, so we have to limit the range that it searches.  To have exact duplicates of search results, we'd have to perform the full, expensive (from a performance standpoint) queries with every keystroke, and that's just not workable with nearly half a million members and 4 million+ unique users each month hitting the server farm.

The lack of preservation of results is simply an artifact of the fact that it provides you the answers as you type; it uses a technology called AJAX that in general doesn't allow the preservation of previous pages.  It's a tradeoff that for the time being we think is worth it.  We want that "search as you type" box to let people very quickly find a recipe.  If we had it remember the viewstate, it would be far too slow to be useful.

Another reason you are seeing different results is also a side-effect of something that we think is actually a good design decision.  When you do a broad search (not a "search as you type" search), BigOven throws out little words like "on", "a", etc., since exact matches on those words would restrict the search results too much.  Try the same example using "Devils Horseback" without the word "on", and you'll see it find the three recipes again in the broader search.

We'll look into ways that we can make these results a little more consistent, but we cannot guarantee anything there -- there are several subtle query optimizations in there to keep the searching rather fast, and we think it's an OK tradeoff if the results are slightly varying. 

To do the broadest possible search, use the Find button on the toolbar. 

Just curious - is the bug fix that the "Find" button in the program didn't find the recipes as well? In your reply you recommend "Find" but it didn't work either.

 You should be able to use "Find", but drop the "on" in your search.  Use "Find" and type "Devils Horseback" and you should see all of them.

Ok, that worked, by dropping the "on", but your search is totally contradictory! You say in one place that it will ignore the conjunctions, adjectives, etc. and then in another search (Find" you say I must drop these.

Why not make all consistent and accept anything typed and bring it up like Google? Your methods are frustrating. People like things to be consistent.

I don't care if a search takes longer as long as it finds what is available and what I am searching for. Google search is available for websites and it works well.

We agree -- it's logged for a future fix.  Thanks qwertz.