| Discussion Forum: Thread 162888 |
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| | | Author: | bb442684  | | Posted: | Dec 23, 2013 02:20 | | Subject: | Fuzzy search | | Viewed: | 125 times | | Topic: | Suggestions | | Status: | Open | | Vote: | [Yes|No] | |
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| One thing I'd love to see for the parts database/catalog is fuzzy search,
so that name components don't have to be exact. By fuzzy I don't mean
the use of "*" as in prop* or 3x3*, but rather that the search
engine understand relationships between words. For example, if it knew that "tree",
"leaf", and "foliage" were related, that would be really helpful, or if it knew
that "spring" and "shock absorber" were related concepts, or that "gun" and "weapon"
were related.
As I've been entering in a few hundred lots over the past couple of days,
I've had to go to Partsref and Peeron to look up the names of certain parts.
One that I had a really hard time finding was
because I was thinking of it as a "pulley" (I'd seen it used that way once
long ago).
Anyway, I'm gonna post a link to an old LUGNET article from 1999 with a better
description of what I am trying to say:
http://news.lugnet.com/admin/database/?n=128
I never got around to implementing these fuzzy searches in a real parts database,
but it does work interestingly well for the small test database that it uses
in the proof-of-concept examples. One of my favorite examples there is typing
in pizza, because it knows that "pizzeria" is related to "pizza" (note
that "pizzeria" has an "e" where the "a" is in "pizza") and it knows that the
Pirates rowboat oar and white round paddle are used as pizza peels in various
old Town sets -- so they show up too.
[P=4865pb01]
So, in terms of BrickLink, if I typed in a search for "pizza", I thought it would
be really cool if it returned the explictly named "pizza" items but then below
that said something like, "These items are related:" and listed the others.
--Todd
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| | | | | Author: | bb314137 | | Posted: | Dec 23, 2013 05:10 | | Subject: | Re: Fuzzy search | | Viewed: | 46 times | | Topic: | Suggestions | |
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| Hello Todd.
I'm sure that more than one person have thought about the tag search system
(it has even been implemented on the Owlery), and it is a great method, that
should work in the future.
However, the suggestions that you are making are nowadays futile. We will have
to wait until the new BrickLink 2.0 is released (hopefully next year), as development
on this site stopped some time ago, and new things won't be implemented.
On a side note, maybe we could start getting info and tags already, to have it
ready for when the new BL arrives.
In Suggestions, fibblesnork writes:
| | One thing I'd love to see for the parts database/catalog is fuzzy search,
so that name components don't have to be exact. By fuzzy I don't mean
the use of "*" as in prop* or 3x3*, but rather that the search
engine understand relationships between words. For example, if it knew that "tree",
"leaf", and "foliage" were related, that would be really helpful, or if it knew
that "spring" and "shock absorber" were related concepts, or that "gun" and "weapon"
were related.
As I've been entering in a few hundred lots over the past couple of days,
I've had to go to Partsref and Peeron to look up the names of certain parts.
One that I had a really hard time finding was
because I was thinking of it as a "pulley" (I'd seen it used that way once
long ago).
Anyway, I'm gonna post a link to an old LUGNET article from 1999 with a better
description of what I am trying to say:
http://news.lugnet.com/admin/database/?n=128
I never got around to implementing these fuzzy searches in a real parts database,
but it does work interestingly well for the small test database that it uses
in the proof-of-concept examples. One of my favorite examples there is typing
in pizza, because it knows that "pizzeria" is related to "pizza" (note
that "pizzeria" has an "e" where the "a" is in "pizza") and it knows that the
Pirates rowboat oar and white round paddle are used as pizza peels in various
old Town sets -- so they show up too.
[P=4865pb01]
So, in terms of BrickLink, if I typed in a search for "pizza", I thought it would
be really cool if it returned the explictly named "pizza" items but then below
that said something like, "These items are related:" and listed the others.
--Todd
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