Enhancement idea: keyword option for species search

[bekateen]

Would it possible to add a keyword option to the Cat-eLog species search?

This occurred to me as I've been reading the thread about Breeding Doradids. In that thread some comments came up about whitewater and blackwater fishes. My clown pleco is a whitewater fish, so it made me wonder which other cats featured on this site are whitewater spp.. The idea I had was that if I were setting up a tank and it was supposed to mimic a whitewater habitat, then I could search for fish that have whitewater mentioned in their description. I realize that I could search by pH for more neutral pH tolerant spp (for whitewater), but that's not quite the same idea.

Of course, the benefit of such a keyword search box would be that if there were anything you were looking for (e.g., albino?) you could search the entire Cat-eLog for it at once and find all relevant spp.

Currently, the only way I can find to do this is to use the Site Search tool and type a combination of (1) the keyword I'm interested in, AND (2) an odd word or phrase that is somewhat unique to the Cat-eLog pages and which is unlikely to appear in the forums, such as "pronunciation," "etymology," or "Cat-eLog Data Sheet." This will also catch some of the CotM results, but that's not too distracting, since the CotM entries are also referring back to species.

Just an idea.

Cheers, Eric

[Jools]

In this example, the site search tool and a query of

Code: Select all

whitewater +"cat-elog data sheet"

ought to do the trick? Does that solve the requirement? I could add notes around this kind of thing to the site search page?

Jools

[bekateen]

Hi Jools,

Would your solution produce a result that lists species in the same way that the current species search tool works? If so, then yes, that's exactly what I had in mind. If such a search option is not possible through the species search tool, or at least if it is not easy to code, then I think the alternative is what you wrote out afterward - adding some notes/instructions to the site search webpage that gives guidance to users so that they can use the site search tool like a species search tool.

What I was envisioning/proposing originally was to add this type of search as a field the species search page, in addition to the current search options such as Temp min/max, Size min/max, Distribution, etc.. That way, the user can still use all the other species search options, and then additionally narrow down their results by things such as water properties (whitewater, blackwater, etc) or some other keywords (e.g., maybe they're searching for fish that like to eat "wood" or a fish that likes a "sand" substrate). As I imagine this, the returned results would be restricted to species entries, rather than also including pages such as Shane's world and COTM entries, and the results would be displayed in the same manner that the species search currently uses.

Thanks for looking into this.
Cheers, Eric

[bekateen]

Perhaps the other thing I might be taking for granted is this: I'm assuming that the species search tool does not search the entire PC website, but rather it searches only through the cat-elog database. If that is already the case, then you wouldn't need to add any such term as "cat-elog data sheet" to the search tool code.

The purpose of that odd phrase in my original post was to try to eliminate a search of other areas of the PC website, such as the forums. And if your species search tool searches only the species database, then narrowing the search is already accomplished.
Eric

[bekateen]

Okay, I tried, and found, another way to focus the search, which is more efficient that simply adding an odd search string such as "Cat-eLog Data Sheet." If the search bot includes the string, "inurl:planetcatfish.com/common/species" then that seems to limit all of the results to CLOG pages; it doesn't even identify COTMs or Shane's World articles.

Again, the original intent of my suggestion is to include an input window directly on the species search page, so that the output results resembles the current output as seen when the normal species search is run, but the results are limited by the keyword that the person is trying to find. I wasn't trying to create a search that simply outputs links, which is what the site search currently does.

Cheers, Eric