Searchable Interest: But only on exact matches - leading to not enough matches

[Pussycat Catnap]

The new searchable interests are great and a much desired and finally welcome feature.

But they only seem to work on exact matches.

The best example to see the problem this creates is give yourself these two:

"Exploring"

"Exploring SL"

And maybe try 'exploring second life' and 'exploring secondlife'

- 4 sets of people not finding each other who likely meant the same thing... (Unless the exploring folks just meant exploring the conflicting interests in the war between China and the Mogilian invaders of the middle ages?)

 

What can we do about this?

Should we be asking for wildcarding on it, or do we need to start pressuring people to check the results of their interests and pick the most popular wording of any given theme, or just leave it in its somewhat broken / somewhat working state? :)

 

[Dana Hickman]

I noticed this as well, and agree the exact match thing isn't really going to help when one can type anything in the box. I did notice the auto-complete usually came up with similar "already entered" interests, but also many duplicates of the same subject that are just worded differently. I would say that unless LL gets rid of the entry box and goes with a rigid, premade interest list, then the only other decent option I'd think is to encourage people to select from existing interest matches whenever possible. At least that might help to cut down on some of the redundancy. I do like the wildcard idea for displaying matches, but they'll need to improve on the hits vs. misses ratio because even without it there's tons of unrelated stuff coming up.

[Pussycat Catnap]

Since the entry thing can come up with similar interests as you are typing them in - it seems like wildcarding is only a database toggle away.

Just have them sort the results showing what the exact interest the other person had typed in, and in order of how similar the words are.

Do it so it prefers matches with identical words but differing phrases over those with similar words.

In other words:

Roots Reggae would be a better match to Reggae than Reggaeton.

- Most of the time, that kind of prioritizing is also contextually correct.

 

Though it is not always perfectly clear:

Dance, Dancing, Dance club, Dancehall

- Which of these is closer in meaning to which? The 4th, in music genres; actually refers to the 'bling, drugs, violence, gangs, and mysogyny' variation of reggae (the 'anti-bob marley' even while the beat can sound the same), but can also mean the same thing as 'dance club'. The first might be intending enjoyment of dancing, or might be a reference to clubs.

 

But most of the time when people put multiple words, they've got a subject with various adjectives, verbs, and adverbs tacked on - but when they alter spelling of a word they do it to intend something different.