Earlier this week, we introduced a couple new little enhancements to Criticker’s Search functionality: Collections & Auto-Complete
Collections have become one of the most popular and important parts of Criticker, since we introduced them in December, 2008. There are currently over 1500 public collections, where users have gathered everything from Rober Ebert’s Most Hated Films to movies based on video games. There’s always been a search function on the main Collections page, but now we’ve added it to the main search bar and results, as well.
Auto-Complete is something we’ve been wanting to work on for awhile. Especially useful when you’re searching for films with strange or foreign spellings, Criticker will now help complete your search after you’ve typed the first few letters.
Let us know what you think in the comments! And our continuing thanks to go out to all of you who make suggestions on improving Criticker.
I love the auto-complete feature as the search can be a little tricky if you don’t know the exact title and it even saves you some time. Great addition.
if I can just interject between my girlish screams of joy at the auto-complete:
after typing something in, i should be able to select from the suggestions using the up and down arrow keys (then press enter), which it appears i cannot do.
Thanks, lads.
Thads.
I was also going to mention that the up and down keys should work. It’s kinda irritating to have to go to the mouse while you’re typing.
Another thing I noticed is that the autocomplete has some encoding issues for non-ASCII symbols. If you type in ‘Amel’ or ‘Amél’ it displays “Am�lie” as the first result. Not sure how that will look in this blog comment, but on my end the e with the accent is one of those question mark blocks, typical of text that thinks it’s utf8 but isn’t. I tested this both in Firefox and in Chrome.
Nice work on the autocomplete though!
It would be nice if the year could be displayed next to the titles. If you type in, say, “Undertow”, there are three Undertows displayed, but there is no way of knowing which is which.
It would be cool if the auto-complete could be expanded to include people. I searched for Jim Carrey and didn’t necessarily want to see a list of movies with Jim in the title. I know that’s a tricky one due to the amount of records to be searched. Maybe it could change depending on what dropdown option is selected.
I didn’t even take the time to read the previous comments to see if this has been adressed, but typing a film with remakes, such as “Robin Hood”, “Alice in Wonderland”, or “A Nightmare on Elm Street” to name a few recent remakes, makes it ocnfusing. It would be nice to add the year if possible, is what I’m trying to say. Great, other than that.
Alright guys, we’ve got a couple of your suggestions implemented: 1) the character encoding problem, for things like “Amélie”. 2) The up & down arrows for the autocomplete results.
Thanks again for the suggestions!
Ok, another weird thing about the autocomplete: if you select the top suggestion, either by clicking on it with the mouse or pressing down and enter, it takes you to the search page instead of to the film page. This only happens for the top result; if you choose number two or a later one it goes to the film page like it’s supposed to.