Help SmugMug design better search results

Baldy

We're astonished at how many searches are done monthly. I've been calling customers & non-SmugMug subscribers who search to ask what they search for, and how we can improve their results.

A large number of our customers want their photos to be found, admired, and commented on. When we hear of people using Flickr, that's the big draw.

Question is, what info in the search results is important to you? Here's what we give now for galleries:



Can we lose the gallery description? How important is date modified? Are we missing crucial info like gallery owner, number of photos? I don't recall getting those requests but maybe I didn't search the feature request thread well enough.

Here's a mockup of a prettier design:



Likes? Dislikes?

One obvious addition would be to double the length of the gallery title by providing two lines for it. Then the question is what else is needed that would give useful info without overwhelming?

Your thoughts.

DJ-S1

I think the gallery description is very helpful in narrowing down the type of gallery you are searching for. I don't think the featured photo and the gallery name are not enough.

I like the looks of the mockup, but I'd like to see the description in there somewhere. Maybe as a mouseover popup? I also like how the mock up has more results per page - that's very big for me.

batts

I seem to have problems with the search function in general. I can't understand how it works, nor should I have to, but it never searches in a manner I can predict. I like to have a general understanding of the search, but I can say it basically doesn't work 90% of the time for me to understand it, so this might not be very constructive for this thread.

For instance I had a gallery and gallery description created weeks ago with "Acuity" in it, but search wouldn't find it. After talking in the IRC channel someone renamed it and I guess that kicks in a re-index of it. So now that works for that gallery, but I still have other galleries that have the same issue.

I don't think this is the proper way for me to handle making the search function work for my galleries. Not only would it take a long time, but how did they get missed the first time they were created, something seems broken in my gallery, or I'm doing something different that everyone else isn't doing.

I guess I'd like to see some sorta predictable search functions, I like the layout you have there, looks clean and simple. Gallery names, sub-categories, categories, descriptions, keywords would be on my list of searchable items, and maybe even uploaded photo names, non case sensitive, date range is nice also, maybe date taken. EXIF data would be nice. It would be nice to search public smugmug albums for a camera model / brand to see how nice the photos are taken with it before you go out and buy one, or some of the other EXIF data.

I like the idea of the search breaking out Galleries, Photos, with the correct search string, that would be nice.

Leo

I like the "prettier design." It immediately tells me there are entire galleries with photos of my search term, individual photos of my search term, and people with the search term name.

Nice looking design, too.

Baldy

batts wrote:

I seem to have problems with the search function in general. I can't understand how it works, nor should I have to, but it never searches in a manner I can predict. I like to have a general understanding of the search, but I can say it basically doesn't work 90% of the time for me to understand it, so this might not be very constructive for this thread.

It's actually very constructive, so thanks for weighing in.

Search has become an incredible vortex and I want to understand every detail about what's working and not so we can get it right.

I'll give you an example. One customer I called last week searches SmugMug while he watches the evening news and he searches for the locations mentioned in the news. He and his wife frequently search SmugMug for places they dream of traveling.

I found every word he said about how he does the searches, what he searches for, and what constitutes a successful search to be fascinating.

We can greatly improve what we have now without a huge effort if we know all the good, bad and ugly about the current search.

batts

Baldy wrote:

We can greatly improve what we have now without a huge effort if we know all the good, bad and ugly about the current search.

Any ideas how i can make my site re-index without renaming all my galleries to the same name? Something seems to be odd with my site, and the way search function works.

Baldy

batts wrote:

Any ideas how i can make my site re-index without renaming all my galleries to the same name? Something seems to be odd with my site, and the way search function works.

Can you send me a link to your site? You might've done this, but the first thing I'll check is to see if SmugIsland settings are the culprit, which they frequently are.

batts

Baldy wrote:

Can you send me a link to your site? You might've done this, but the first thing I'll check is to see if SmugIsland settings are the culprit, which they frequently are.

http://kothelenz.smugmug.com/
SmugIslands > hello world! yes | hello smuggers! yes

Does changing them no then yes make your site re-index? This seems to be set correctly.

Andy

batts wrote:

http://kothelenz.smugmug.com/
SmugIslands > hello world! yes | hello smuggers! yes

Does changing them no then yes make your site re-index? This seems to be set correctly.

it will, for sure, Batts.

batts

Great, thanks, made things better, but it still doesn't seem to find category & subcategory names, only gallery names or descriptions, maybe this is more the limit of the search function.

It would also be nice if it would search the category and subcategory description hacks too. I'm not aware of any other way to describe a category or subcategory without using this hack, but maybe if this function is added, rather then a hack, the search part will sort itself out fine.

claudermilk

The prettier design definitely is. It also gets a lot more results on the first "page." I think the stripped-down info initially works better, but a gallery description on a mouseover popup/tooltip would be valuable & ought to be easy to do.

Baldy

So what I'm hearing so far is:

1. Lots of results/page is good.
2. Gallery title essential.
3. Gallery description important.

Haven't heard yet that gallery owner is important or modified date or number of photos. Can we safely ignore them in favor of gallery description?

batts

Baldy wrote:

So what I'm hearing so far is:

1. Lots of results/page is good.
2. Gallery title essential.
3. Gallery description important.

Haven't heard yet that gallery owner is important or modified date or number of photos. Can we safely ignore them in favor of gallery description?

Number of photos could be something simple that displays total number of photos/galleries/whatever found meeting the search criteria.

Ability to search EXIF data would be nice.

raulpesch

I love the new design mock-up. It has the polished look-and-feel I was hoping for and the 'tabs' makes it easier to browse the search results. Can't wait for it to launch!!! [/B]

To me, descriptions of galleries would not be very important. I would rather have a quicker indexing mechanism and better possibilities to customize/sort search results.

For example, on my site I use a 'date' naming convention for all my galleries (eg. 20080430 - gallery). This allows me to use searches to enable browsing by year (eg. 2007*, 2008* etc.). Currently, for some strange reason, some galeries are almost instantly searchable, while other galleries are indexed slower. Yesterday for example, I added two galleries. One immediately appears in the search results and the other does not???

Some galleries I added several days ago still don't appear in the search results (example 1, example 2 are all added but do not appear here example. While other more recent galleries (example 1, example 2) were almost instantly added to the search results...

It would be great if indexing of a gallery would automatically be triggered if you add the photos.
It would also be great if there was an option to sort the search results (by name, date etc.) instead of being displayed in a seemingly random order (eg. my search results for 2008* are differently ordered when I'm logged in vs. logged out)

Thanks,
Raul (www.peschfamily.com)

batts

Might be a stretch here, but the ability to search geographic locations might be something that might become more popular in the future once more camera have GPS's in them, or more people tag their photos with this information.

Not sure this would have much of a current need now. I sure wouldn't have any use for it at this time, but others might who take advantage of the GPS functionality of smugmug, only you guys would know the % of people who use this option, and if it's something needed now, or more in the future.

I'm trying to step back and look at it not so much as a smugmug gallery owner, but more someone searching smugmugs site or a friends gallery trying to locate stuff.

denisegoldberg

Baldy wrote:

So what I'm hearing so far is:

1. Lots of results/page is good.
2. Gallery title essential.
3. Gallery description important.

Haven't heard yet that gallery owner is important or modified date or number of photos. Can we safely ignore them in favor of gallery description?

I like the proposed display, and I agree that both the gallery title and description are important.

I think the modified date is important too. I might be interested in more recent photos. Searching smug would give so many results that I think I'd like an option to see the results sorted by modified date, newest first.

Then again, I usually go directly to the galleries of photographers who interest me, so maybe I'm not the right person to be providing an answer to this question.

--- Denise

bch2300

well...

Baldy wrote:

So what I'm hearing so far is:

1. Lots of results/page is good.
2. Gallery title essential.
3. Gallery description important.

Haven't heard yet that gallery owner is important or modified date or number of photos. Can we safely ignore them in favor of gallery description?

#1 yes
#2 yes
#3 yes

but i don't think you should ignore gallery owner and/or number of photos-- even if you put them in popup on mouse over --

a couple of quick sort options would be great, too- sort by most recent, most photos, owner would be very helpful!

the new mockup looks good-