Search anything bar upgrade (partial word matches)

Hey, some minor requests to streamline the UX

It would be great to have the search anything bar to respond to partial search words (e.g. “imp” has 0 result of “imperial”) and also show results in a dropdown menu when typing so you can easily select the item you want.

Also I feel it is better if the help pages open in another tab rather than on the same page as you often want to go back and forth between the ticket/request and the page where the question rose

Thanks for the suggestions.

Particle word matching is a bit of a double-edged sword, to be honest. It’s come up before as an idea, but the arguments against it are also significant, as will often bring up far more results than were intended.

For example, in your case, you clearly would want “imp” to match “imperial”, but would you want it to also match something like “simple IPA” or “Homer Simpon”? Some searches that might intend to only match a beer, might in fact match part of a common customer name and result in lots of results. Of course, you could try just “imp” and then realise there were lots of results and search for “imperial” to get the beer you were looking for, but then is that better than the current search?

These unhelpful matches would be less common if the partial word searching only matched the start of words, so this could be the best option?

I certainly don’t mean to sound negative, but just want to make sure we do the right thing :+1: To date, we’ve been a bit on the fence as to which solution is better, to be honest. Our search infrastructure is quite complex, so we’d want to be absolutely sure we’re heading down the best route before making any changes.

It would be useful to hear from others what they feel about this too as if there’s a lot of support for changing how the search works, this will certainly impact our decision.

We agree with your suggestion on opening the help section in a new tab, so we’ll get this implemented as it should be a simple change. In the meantime, you can Ctrl + click (on Windows) or Cmd + click (on Mac) to open links in a new tab. This should work for all websites you use and is a handy trick that I use hundreds of times every day!

I’ll remove this part of the request from the thread subject so this can become just about your search suggestion. Thanks for all your feedback, it is much appreciated.

Maybe “Imp” is a bad example. It came up with us as an issue because missing one letter in a (admittedly complex) beer name got no result - so you have to backtrack or do another search.

A drop down auto-generating potential result while typing would bypass the too much results problem wouldn’t it?

When this feature request is done, we need to look to also solve: