On a recent trip out of town, I was at a nursery and was frustrated that many of my plant searches were not giving me the results I expected. So I've been working for several days on a new search engine for our database and I'm pretty excited about it, and would love it if some of ya'll would give it a try and see what you think.
The original (and still active) search engine is here:
http://garden.org/plants/searc...
And the new one to beta test is here:
http://garden.org/plants/searc...
Try searching for stuff and see what you find. Compare the same search in the old and the new engine and see the difference. My hope is that the new engine will produce much closer matches to what you're looking for.
For example, if you search for "watermelon" it's likely that you want the fruit. Well, the old search shows you a million other plants that have watermelon somewhere in their name (Peperomia, Nemesia, etc.) The new one shows you a nice long list of watermelons. The goal is for the system to try to better anticipate what you're looking for and give you better guesses. The old way is simply looking at the words and giving back the closest matches without thought to how valuable each plant might be.
I'm not going to get into the details of how the new engine was programmed right now, but I'm definitely wanting some feedback on whether this is looking better or worse than the old original search.
