UKC

Got to say I find using the new search feature a pretty frustrating experience. I'd say it only responds at all about 50% of the time, otherwise it hangs completely and I have to close the browser tab.

It would be useful have the previous search function available as an option. It may be less featured but I don't recall it being quite so unresponsive.

Sorry about this. We're having some infrastructure issues at the moment. We're in the process of resolving them but it will be fully sorted immediately.
 

I've tweaked some of the processes happening on the search server to help smooth out the spikes that were clogging it up, and I think causing the issues you describe. Please let me know if you're still facing the hangs. 

I find the route selection the new search brings up is less likely to give me the information I want, when compared to the old version. It’s much more sensitive to misspellings and, despite the new features, seems just not quite as good at its basic function. 

Hi Sean, can you give any examples of the route selection not being what you expect?

Fistful of Crystals doesn’t bring up the route because it’s actually Fist Full of Crystals. Maybe that’s too big a difference? There have been others recently but I can’t remember. 

I think the flip side of this is that the new search gives you access to a lot more fields that you can search in. For example, these queries all return the correct route as the top result

Crystals roaches

Crystals e6

crystals nick dixon

This makes it pretty easy to narrow down the route you're after if you can remember any other info about it.

If you want a fuzzy search (i.e. taking misspellings in to account) then I find using Google is a good option e.g. ukc fistful of crystals.

I'm sympathetic to the need for fuzzy matching. Sean makes a valid point. 'fistful' should still match 'fist full'. This was always an intended feature of the search, but I wasn't able to get it to run in a performant manner so I had to ditch it.

But nobody likes disappointed users so I've had another look. The search will now fallback to a fuzzy version if it finds no routes for a query.

This means that a query of 'fistful' will not include the route 'a fist full of crystals', because it finds plenty of routes with 'fistful' in the name, but a query of 'fistful of crystals' will find 'a fist full of crystals'.

At some point we'll look at having fuzzy as the default, but it's an expensive operation and the server we currently have isn't up to it.

https://www.ukclimbing.com/logbook/search/?query=fistful%20of%20crystals