Dilemma: Partial word search
Posted on August 30th, 2006 in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Currently, a search performed on a market’s tags will return partial words as well as complete ones. I don’t know whether I ought to leave it this way, or figure out a way to change it. It has both positive and negative consequences.
Positive: let’s say there are markets tagged with “entrepreneur,” “entrepreneurs” (plural), “entrepreneurship,” etc. A search for “entrepr” will find all of them, which is probably as it should be.
Also positive: leaving the current behavior as-is will take less time and effort than figuring out how to change it. This reasoning sounds selfish and lazy (because it is), but there you have it.
Negative: a search for “fiction” will find markets tagged with “non-fiction” as well.
Maybe there should be a checkbox to let the user choose partial or whole-word matches . . . except then I might wind up with a checkbox next to every text field on the search page, which I feel would damage the simplicity of the interface.
The decision might be perfectly clear if I weren’t trying to make it at 12:30 a.m., instead of going to sleep. G’night.