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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

High-Tech Searching

Nov 14, 2007 |  John (12) |  Founders, How-to |  0 comments

One of my favorite things about Vinquire's wine search engine is the ability to use advanced operators. When you search for a wine for sale, you can employ a variety of special characters to really fine tune your search. Let's start with the basics:

Search the important terms only

First, use as few words as possible to describe the wine you are searching for. If your label states, "Bonny Doon Big House Red, California Red Wine", you would want to enter the least amount of words that still clearly defines the wine. In this case, I would start with Big House Red, and see how the results are. If the search results have too many incorrect wines, you can try adding more terms to the search.

Using the '-' operator

Now let's try something more advanced, try searching: 2000 Lynch Bages -Blanc
In this example, we are looking for a bottle of Lynch Bages from the fantastic 2000 Bordeaux vintage, but we're not interested in their white version. So we use the '-' character to keep the word "blanc" out of all search results.

I forgot the wine name!

Let's step it up. So let's say that you were out to dinner last night, and had a fabulous chardonnay with your skewered shrimp. The wine was called "Romb" something, you think to yourself the next day. But "Romb" what? Let vinquire take a crack at it:
Search: Romb* Chard

Rombauer Chardonnay! That was the one. The '*' operator tells Vinquire that you don't know the letters for part of a word. This operator can be used anywhere in a word, except for the first character. So you could also search R*t Mondavi Cab if you forgot Robert's first name for some reason.

I can't spell :(

In a similar sense, what if don't know how to spell some of the words in the wine label? Let's say that, like me, you have a problem spelling Mouton Rothschild. Maybe last night you polished off a few bottles, and today your thinking that it's spelled Moton RothsWild. That will get your zero results, so try this instead: Moton~ RothsWild~

That should get you the right spelling. The '~' operator tells Vinquire to allow a certain "fudge factor" for those words. Once you've determined the correct spelling, search again with the spelling errors corrected.

The next step in getting "high tech" with the wine search is to click the "search options" link -- but I will get to those in the next blog. Happy searching!
Founders, How-to 0 comments

The Vinquire Chronicles, Vol 1

Oct 26, 2007 |  John (12) |  Founders |  1 comment

I wanted to share with our users some history on Vinquire, including what our overall plan is for the website. This blog will be my soapbox for that purpose -- along with some Vinquire cheerleading occasionally. Check this blog for updates once every week or two.

Vinquire was born out of a desire, 2 years ago, to create a user oriented wine review site. The Web 2.0 social networking space was expanding, and there was nothing for the wine world. However, Andy (the other founder) and I are both engineers, so we couldn't just do a community oriented website; we wanted a search engine.

Search is hi-tech, challenging, and profitable. So we began an attempt to merge our two features; a social networking site along w/ a search engine that mines retailers and wineries for inventories.

The result, after almost 2 years, is top-notch search engine. Most people know the thousand pound gorilla of wine search is Wine-Searcher. However, Wine-Searcher is tricky; if you don't pay their subscriber fee, they significantly limit search results by only displaying wines from paying sponsors. Vinquire displays every result, for free, every time. Even comparing Vinquire against the paid version of Wine-Searcher, we frequently beat their results.

Every week, we download millions and millions of web pages, use extremely advanced artificial intelligence to mine those pages for wine, then cluster and display results for our users to peruse. Because of this hi-tech search engine backing, Vinquire can do more than other wine community sites. We can help you find rare bottles and we know average bottle prices, so you can see if you're getting a good deal at your local retailer. And, we never require users to enter a wine name; we already know all the wine names!

There's a lot more that we do. But I won't go off the deep end in my first blog. The reality is, we still have a lot of work to do, but Vinquire is growing in users and employees - keep an eye on us over the next 6 months as we launch new features and rev up our marketing engine. Talk soon -

John Kleven
Founder, Vinquire.com
Founders 1 comment