I'm still working on the overhaul of the price search. Much has been accomplished but I still have a long way to go. At the moment I'm working on the new/improved logic for the advanced search and search results pages. I would like feedback on the following:
I plan to remove the Deal Finder filter option from the advanced search options. Will anyone miss it? (Deal Finder will still be accessible from the left navigation menu and may get reworked to be more useful.)
Switching multiple performer name searches from 'and' logic to 'or' logic. [ example of current method ] I propose that the new search return results for all titles matching either of the names instead of both. It will still list the matching names below the movie title for each match. (I'd rather not let the user choose between and/or on the page as it's often too confusing.)
Some of the new things to expect are:
Vastly improved performance - the current search was written in April of 2000. I'm a little better at this stuff now.
Search by director
Search by DVD New, DVD Used, DVD Rental or VOD
New paging mechanism - searches no longer will need to be re-executed for each page of the results. Clicking through search results pages will be extremely fast.
Gay/Straight filter - user profile preference to display results for all titles, only gay titles or only straight. (Searches initiated from gaydvdreview.com will default to gay-only results.
Review available filter - limit price results to DVDs that have been reviewed on this site.
Exclude store filter - mechanism to exclude search results for certain stores that you're not interested in shopping at. Controlled through user profile setting. Potentially very beneficial to international shoppers.
As far as the deal finder, I won't miss that option. For the multiple performer searches, I'd prefer the 'and' option remain as if you pick two popular stars, you're going to get alot of returns that only have one or the other.
On the new features, I think the upcoming director search is great, I've been hoping for a while that you'd add that.
A suggestion via email a while back was to also add a 'only show Kickback stores' filter option to the advanced search page. Easy enough to do but would it be a useful feature?
I use the deal finder mechanism on the advanced search page regularly. For example, I'll select "gay" titles from "Adult DVD Empire" which are $5 less than anywhere else (knowing that I will also get 15% kickback dollars) and then pick through the resulting list looking for titles which interest me. Then I put together three seperate orders: one that just barely meets each of their three coupon code requirement limits. (I wish they would give %-off coupons rather tha $-off ones - I'd actually spend more with them.)
I'd prefer "and" rather than "or" - I can always run two searches (essentially an "or" search); but running an "and" search without an "and" function is rather difficult and time consuming.
Improved performance is a good thing!
Director search - YES!!!
new/used/rental - nice feature - I don't use VOD and am unlikely to ever do so
power paging is great, too
The gay/straight thing is more complicated than that:
It's really gay/lesbian/bisexual/straight with crossdressing and/or pre-op transexual men (i.e., men as women) and strap-on weilding women (i.e., women as men) throwing gum in the works. There were a number of posts about this not long ago when Steph was explaining an unimplemented feature of the data structure.
And I'm not so sure I want it tied to my profile unless it is extremely easy to override wothout going into my profile. I don't really care about there being a default gay or straight search so much as I'd like an easy way to search for any one (or more) of the above groups along with one or more traditional categories (e.g., anal, Asian, Black, bondage, classic, comedy, compilation, couples, feature film, fetish, Foreign, gonzo, etc.)
Can you give us two seperate category boxes? One would have the six orientation selections that could default to straight and gay, depending on the way you get there and the other would have all the traditional category choices and would default to "all categories." Both of the boxes would allow multiple selections (by holding the control key) and a search would be an "and" search against any of the selections from either box. (In other words: I would be able to search for [[gay or bisexual] and [Latino or Asian]] which would return gay/Latino, gay/Asian, bisexual/Latino and bisexual/Asian titles.)
Having a review available filter would be useful, too
Having a method to exclude certain stores is a great feature; but, again, I'd want an easy method to override the exclusions.
This is technically feasible and would make for an excellent search feature but in order for it to be useful we would need to recategorize most of the products in the database (and 100% of the gay titles). While recategorization is a good idea it's a little beyond our resources a the moment.
Ok, here's another one related to performer searches:
When a performer search is done with the current system it goes out and returns matches for all of the performers. A search for 'alex' with the current system returns all movies with 'alex', 'alexa rea', 'alexus', 'alex sanders', 'alexandra silk', etc. Not real useful depending on what you're searching for.
Steph likes the idea of creating an intermediate page of performer's names if more than one matching name is found. it would list all of the matches with checkboxes. This way you can select the exact performer's names instead of pouring through pages of stuff you might not be interested in.
That method of searching can be a bit of a pain, but a heck of a lot nicer than having to wade through page after page of a performer that you're not interested in.
If the director, or the correct one is listed, of course.
As to the show kickback stores filter request, you can hold down CTRL+ click on the mouse. But it looks as though the 5 kickback stores are all in a row anyways.
Again, the performers check box would be nice, of course if the right performers are listed.
Another general feedback item: Would you like to be able to save your search criteria? Then you would be able to run complex advanced price searches with the click of a button instead of needing to set them up each time you would like to run them.
With the new way I'm writing the search page saving the search parameters is fairly easy. The more tedious yet not difficult part is creating a means for user's to display, select and manage their saved search queries.
I still have to finish writing the 'save this search' feature but let me know what you think about the beta version of the new search.
You can also take any current seaerch results page and convert it to the new version by changing the page loaded in the URL. To convert an old price search to the new search results just change search_results.dlt to search_resutls2.dlt in the URL.
Over the course of the next few days I'll be adding the navigation and user interface.
Forgot to mention the "return to search page" link at the top of the search results page. Check it out. It will make fine-tuning your searches infinitely easier than it used to be.
Posted - Jun 24 2003 : 2:44PM