Improved search

We have finally improved the search on the site. It has long been a weak link on the site, and is still not perfect, but is at least finally useful.

Previously if you wanted to find the Red Lion in Bristol you had to search for Red Lion and then filter by Bristol, Now you can just search for Red Lion, Bristol and the search will return all the matches. The new search will also do its best to correct spellings and the like, so if you are not sure if a pubs name has 's' on the end it will find it either way now. Also search on Postcode is enabled, so if you type a postcode into the search (make sure you include the space though) the search will return any matches we have at that postcode.

The old filters have been removed to save space on the screen, normally I don't like removing functionality, but the filters were a messy solution that has been solved by allowing people to search with the town and county names in the search.

As ever feel free to let us know how you are finding it, we do try and respond to all Feedback, this can either be done publicly her on this blog or on our forums, where anyone can add to your thoughts (the more people who tell us they need something the more likely we are to do it). Or more directly using the feedback system on the site.

For any developers out there, we are using the Sphinx search solution to provide our search. I cannot praise it enough, I found it really easy to set up, and where I had any issues there was generally a solution already on their forums. The results are easily tailored and infinitely superior to anything I have ever been able to provide using SQL solutions with a far smaller server usage footprint.