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High-Tech Searching, Part 2

Dec 19, 2007 |  John (12) |  Founders, How-to |  2 comments

Last time we covered a few of Vinquire's powerful search operators. This time, we'll cover the options that pop out after you click the Search Options link next to the search box.

For starters, most of the options that pop out after clicking "Search Options" are straightforward. You can control maximum price, vintage, wine type, bottle size, and which retailers you are searching -- all in a simple fashion. However, the last option, "Search Style" can be potent yet confusing, and therefore deserves some explanation.

Search Style: "AND - Price Sort"


Using this style of search (which is the default), Vinquire requires that every term you search for exists in the returned wines. This means users should not enter too many terms when searching. We touched on this in the first post, but it can't be emphasized enough: start searching with the least amount of terms that will still identify the wine—you can always add more terms to the search if you get too many erroneous results.

But what about the "AND - Price sort" part? Price sort simply means that we're going to sort the wine results on price: from low, to high. This is our default style of search, and we do this to help you find wine at the best price. The downside is that we require every search term to exist in the results, which can limit results. This is why we have a second option.

Search Style: "OR - Relevancy Sort"


This style search does not require every search term to exist when we display wines. Use this search style when you are getting limited search results using the "AND" search style.

For example, let's say you're a sucker for punishment and really want to get your hands on a bottle of Kosta Browne Pinot Noir Sonoma Coast, Kanzler Vineyard. If you use the default "AND" search for that, you get limited results. However, if you change it to the "OR" search, good things happen and you might be able to land a bottle. This works because with the "OR" search, we don't require every single term you searched for to exist. We'll do our best effort to match as many terms as we can, but we won't guarantee that every term in your wine search will exist in every result.

So why not do all searches with "OR - Relevancy sort"? If you use this search style, some of the returned results may not be the wine you were searching for. Buyer beware—you will need to verify that the wine we returned really is the exact wine you are looking for. With the Kosta Brown search, we might leave off Kanzler. That word is important so you will have to be careful. Additionally, we no longer can sort these results by price. So you will manually have to go through the returned wines and find the best price yourself.

The upshot is that if you are trying to find a specific or rare wine, or in general are getting poor search results, you can use the "OR" search and get a broader view of what our database offers.

The Next Level:

So far, we're still not hitting the "high-tech" angle. Let's go back to our quest for the Kosta Browne. I mentioned above that the "OR" search doesn't require all search terms to exist in the wines, but let's say we want to guarantee that the word Kanzler is in every result. If you add a '+' before the word Kanzler, then the "OR" search will force the word Kanzler to exist in all search results.

Using the '+' operator can help you refine your results when using the "OR" search style.

Finally, all of the operators like '~' and '*' detailed in the last advanced search blog will work when using the "OR" style search as well. Happy hunting.
 Founders, How-to 2 comments

2 Comments

#1WineLover said,  

Jan 05, 2008 at 02:29PM  

Thanks for this info. I'm able to find some wines that I previously could not using this feature. Especially for german or french labels that have so many words on them, using the OR search still finds good results. Thanks guys~

#2Andy said,  

Jan 05, 2008 at 02:34PM  

We're glad the feature worked well for you! Thanks for using Vinquire

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