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But faster than you can imagine, the next requirement comes in: OR filters! bicycles that are (made of steel AND weigh from 10 to 20kg) OR (made of car
by mg 3y ago
But faster than you can imagine, the next requirement comes in: OR filters!
bicycles that are (made of steel AND weigh from 10 to 20kg) OR
(made of carbon AND weigh from 5 to 10kg)
Hmm.. I don't know if this is a good example. I have been in the product search space for almost 10 years now and that feature request never came up. And I cataloged thousands of feature requests users had about product search interfaces.
In the rare case users do something like this, they usually use two tabs. One, where they compare steel bikes and one where they compare carbon bikes.
It makes sense, when you think about the frontend implications. Users are very used to checkboxes and range sliders. The user would check "steel" and set the range slider to "10-20". Now how do they expect to duplicate the sliders and the checkboxes to construct the alternative configuration? They open the page in a new tab and use the alternative settings in that tab.
- valenterry 3y agoYeah, maybe the example isn't that great, I admit so much. :-) However, it's not only about the users as in the visitors of the shop. It can also be a feature such as "show similar bicycles" that will require more complicated queries. And while it's of course possible to maybe run multiple queries and combine the results by code, it can be nice to just do it in one query that is easy to understand and debug/optimize because it's pretty much just SQL.
- sausagefeet 3y agoMaybe it's how you approach products or the space you've been in, but the ability to do "OR" has come up quite frequently for me, and on the opposite side of things, I often am very frustrated when products with search do not let me do OR.
- mg 3y agoCan you link to a product search where OR is supported?
- sausagefeet 3y agoPretty much any log search interface, I use Papertrail. Google search. For the feature I am currently working on, it's an audit trail for the operations we run and OR is required. I wish the various searches on GitHub supported "or". Additionally, tons of products do support "OR". Take the Amazon search. It has sections that are "OR" inside of them and "AND" across the sections.
- mg 3y agoOutside of product search, there certainly are user customizable OR functions in search. That's why I said that the product search example the article gave is probably not a good example. Because in product search it is very, very unusual and not something users expect. I'm not sure exactly what you mean with the Amazon search, but I have the feeling that what you refer to is not the type of user customizable OR that the article used as an example. Can you link to such an Amazon search with "OR" and "AND"?
- sausagefeet 3y agoLiterally any Amazon search is an OR and an AND. For example, I want products below 200 euros and brands speedo or quicksilver. If you mean an Amazon search that allows you to explicitly type this in, they don't and, sorry, I was probably not explicit enough in what I am saying. Now my point is, OR does show up very often in product search, but, it's usually very limited in that it's OR within a category and AND across categories, and there is a pretty standard interface for expressing this.
- mg 3y agoproducts below 200 euros and brands speedo or quicksilver That is what I expected you could mean. Yes, that is a popular pattern. But it is not customizable like the "bicycles that are (made of steel AND weigh from 10 to 20kg) OR (made of carbon AND weigh from 5 to 10kg)" given in the article. When you select two brands on Amazon, they are always connected via OR and when you select the 200 euros, that is always connected to the rest via AND. So the typical search?brands=speedo,quicksilver&priceMax=200 works. The point of the article is that this does not work for customizable AND OR constructs, and therefore one should use SQL. And then it gives the bicycles example, stating that this feature request comes up "faster than you can imagine". But no, it almost never comes up in product search. I have not seen it even once in the last 9 years among the thousands of feature requests I looked at.
- ahoka 3y agoOh yes, the users don’t want OR, but they want sliders where the useful range is in the two first pixels due to some insanely large value at the end.