I am struggling at times with the search function, it seems I need to input precise whole word searches to look for a lead, customer or phone number, partial searches don’t return results.
Is there a wildcard or string search I can use for partial word/number results?
For example, searching for Dave will return all the entities with Dave as a contact but doesn’t return Dave’s Cafe Bar (unless Dave is a listed contact!) because the whole word contains ‘s
If I could search for Dav and return all possible results it would be easier to avoid duplications etc. With multiple entities of very similar names it is time consuming to look at every result for a search term that may have been input with a quirk or typo etc and therefore still not appear in the list
I have looked for answers on the community but haven’t found them, apologies if I just haven’t looked hard enough!
yes. I have also mentioned this elsewhere - a more lenient search anything bar would save quite some frustration. Can’t remember the rationale why breww is wanting to adhere too such specific terms
My example: searching for J & B’s only responds to J&B’s or J & B’s . not: J&B, JBs, etc.
It depends what you’re looking for. The generic search “for anything” does seem a bit dumb. But the BrewwQL is more powerful. Obv, you have to be in (e.g.) “Customers”. And not all the fields you might want are available.
BrewwQL definitely is powerful but has a different funtion. The search anything is supposed to be a quick reference bar to go to a beer, batch, product page etc. so having to be too specific in the terms has always come across to me as counterproductive.
I do think there is definitely scope for some improvement here in the search to make it more “fuzzy”, but simply matching partial words doesn’t (from our experience) function quite as well as you’d initially expect as this can cause a lot of unwanted matches. For reference, there is also this related thread: Search anything bar upgrade (partial word matches)
We did a lot of work on the trade store search to make it “forgiving” of typos, punctuation, etc, so it may be possible to port some of this over to the main Breww search too. We’ll dev team schedule some time soon to explore the feasibility and benefits of using the alternative search logic in the main Breww search too.
I agree with GW. I don’t know how the “search anything” works, but I do know it’s difficult to index something like this (what do the developers do? index every field in every table? How often? )
A more fuzzy (partial matching) search might be better. Particularly when strict searches return no results.
We’ve been exploring the fuzzy/partial matching search algorithm that we used on the Trade Store in the main Breww “search anything” and while it can be helpful, it can also result in a lot of false positives.
What we’ve done now, is stick with the current search algorithm, however, if this returns no results at all, then it will automatically retry your search using the “fuzzy” approach. If the fuzzy approach then finds some results, it will show you a warning bar at the top of the results to let you know that they’re not exact matches. For example, a fuzzy search for “Dave” will match results containing “Dale”, this might have been a typo, but it’s probably not what you’re looking for. On the other hand, a search for “Dace” would show both “Dave” and “Dale” results which is good as “Dace” is likely a mistake.
We hope this is useful and we’re happy to look at this again in the future, but we didn’t have a big enough gap in the development schedule now to investigate this any further at this time.
Thanks Gijs, yes, unfortunately these special characters cause the recent change not to work (the same applies to the “Dave’s” example above). Sorry, I should have mentioned this in my message before.
To account for these, there will need to be much larger changes behind the scenes. This part will have to move into the implementation of the “proper” feature request as this will take us a lot longer. I’ve noted this in Search anything bar upgrade (partial word matches)
