Search Secrets

by

Chris Kaplonski, Data Analyst, Sustainability Nerd

You’ll know that little box,  the one that pops up when you click on the magnifying glass? Yeah, this one:

Did you know that you can do more with it than simply put a few words into it? Let’s dig a bit deeper with what it can do.

First: This is hopefully obvious, but it bears repeating anyway. The search function searches more than just the names of products. It also searches descriptions, and a few other categories. This also explains why you might sometimes see something that looks a bit odd in the search results. If you search for ‘Burgundy’ you may sometimes find wines that aren’t from the region. That will be because the description mentions Burgundy.  If you display the results by Relevance, it will bump those sorts of results to the end.

You can also search by stock code, if, for some reason, you know that.  It’s quicker than typing the whole name if you want a precise match. But yeah, who apart from me actually does that?

Second: You can do logic! Well, the search system handles simple logical operators. Whether or not you think logically is another issue. One note: the logical operators need to be in CAPS. If you don’t put them in all caps, the system will treat them as something to search for, not a logics statement.

For example, say you want to find all the White Rioja we carry.  Simply typing ‘White Rioja’ won’t get you very far, since the search will be quite inclusive. You can, of course, filter by Wine Colour and then Region, or vice versa. But perhaps you are lazy. Or want to include case deals.  Then typing ‘White AND Rioja’ gets you what you are looking for. When I ran this recently, I got seven results.  One was our Rocking Rioja case, five were white Rioja wines, and one was a white Vermouth from the Rioja region.

Or imagine you half-remember a wine you liked. It has Chateau in the title, but wasn’t from Bordeaux.  Search on ‘Chateau NOT Bordeaux’ and hopefully you find what you are looking for.  If wine isn’t your thing, you can search for ‘beer NOT porter.’

If typing AND and NOT are too much for you, you can use a ‘+’ in front of a word for AND and a ‘-‘ in front of a word for NOT.  In other words, ‘+Chateau -Bordeaux’ is the same as ‘Chateau NOT Bordeaux.’

Third: You can use wildcards. They’re the standard ones: * for any number of characters, and ? for a single character. The system is a bit quirky. It will use a wildcard when you are typing, to suggest results. You can then, of course, simply click on what pops up as a suggestion. However, if you hit return on a partial work, it returns no results.

To illustrate with an example. You want to find a particular white Bordeaux, and it has Suduiraut in the name. But you can’t remember the proper spelling of Suduiraut. (After all this time, I still get it wrong about 83% of the time.) Typing ‘Sudu’ in the search box will give you two results, but if you then hit <enter>, you get none.  Typing Sudu* and then searching will yield those two results.

That’s it for now. Hopefully this helps you find what you are looking for, or maybe something you didn’t know you were looking for, a tiny bit easier.