Search technique (tags)

1

Hi, this is truly not heuristic in the sense that it’s programmable, but this morning one of my app users complained that she could not find a “Theresa” in my app data. I explained that if she searches the internet, she will find the lady spelled her name “Teresa” (without the ‘h’).

After thinking a bit, I decided to try an experiment. I added a “Tags” column next to the name in my app data (not visible on the screen).

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Now it finds all the Teresas, no matter how they are spelled. I added “terese” to the tags, because sometimes people spell her name that way.

This is not a solution that is able to be widely implemented, but it can help with some hard to spell names or names that have more than one common spelling.

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2

There is one more awesome way to create tags. That won’t be suitable in your use-case though, but it can be suitable in use-cases like creating a FAQ list.

I added 3 keywords to my FAQs list, and created 3 more API columns that were connected to Dictionary.com’s API. I generated all available synonyms for the 3 keywords I put in. That gave me almost 100s of keywords combined.

Now I combined those 3 columns, and added them to my detail screen and ofcourse hid them. Now my search bar became very easy for users to find relevant post.

For example the FAQ was related to payment, and my keywords were: Cash, Order, Check-out. It generated over 100 extra keywords.

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