Dismiss Notice
How Does This Work?

You create a free account and set a Gmail filter to forward your Ingress email damage reports.

The damage reports are processed in realtime into the Outgress analytics and alerting engine.

That's the short version.

Is This Allowed?

We believe so, but you decide.

But My Secret Data!

No one on the opposing faction cares who on their team is attacking you. Do you care who on your team is attacking opposing portals?

Implemented Agent/Portal search

Discussion in 'Feature Requests' started by Kilo G, Nov 7, 2015.

  1. Kilo G

    Kilo G New Member Explorer Enlightened L16

    You'll have to excuse my short description and being unfamiliar with this process. Would it be possible to have a field where I can enter an agent or portal name and list the results? Maybe even a partial search?
    Am I doing it right?
     
    Kilo G, Nov 7, 2015
    #1
  2. digitalpoint

    digitalpoint Administrator Staff Member Illuminator Enlightened L15

    digitalpoint, Nov 10, 2015
    #2
  3. digitalpoint

    digitalpoint Administrator Staff Member Illuminator Enlightened L15

    This has been done for awhile... forgot to post.
     
    digitalpoint, Jan 19, 2016
    #3
    PaTChBuZ006+outgress likes this.
  4. PaTChBuZ006+outgress

    PaTChBuZ006+outgress New Member Enlightened L14

    Kind of handy!

    If you are interested in improving this, I have a couple of thoughts that ultimately turn the search terms into an advanced search for portals. Not sure if it's already there and undocumented or that I just haven't learned how to do it. So far, I've only found that I can quote the search terms to match them in a specific order.

    I'd like to limit the portal search to a city or indicate that some search terms should only be matched within the "location" field.
    I'd like to be able to specify exact name matches not just partial.
    I'd like to be able to specify some terms as "required" or that they "must be present"
    I'd like to be able to specify that at least one term from a list of terms is present. (i.e. {"Church" or "Cathedral" or "Chapel" or "Temple" or "Synagogue" or "Mosque" etc.}/{Seminary/Convent/Monastery})
    Would be impressed if it supported regular expressions but I'd be asking for an awful lot here.
     
    PaTChBuZ006+outgress, May 12, 2016
    #4
  5. digitalpoint

    digitalpoint Administrator Staff Member Illuminator Enlightened L15

    Well... I spent a couple hours messing around with this, and this is what I finally decided:
    • Limiting portal search to the location field is a lot trickier internally than you would think. It more or less would require a rewrite of how the search works internally. Not worth the effort at this point for something that I'm not sure would even get much use (I suspect most people aren't going to go through the trouble of calling out the fields they want to search when the normal search searches everything already. Maybe in the future at some point, but like I said... would require a reworking of how search data is stored and managed internally.
    • An exact match option for individual fields would also require a complete rework of how things work and might even lead to search being overall less useful. Exact matches are always returned first in search results already as it is. I'd think this would be the preferred way of doing things normally anyway... see exact matches first, then if those aren't what you are looking for, you can go deeper through the results for stuff that doesn't match exactly. For example, a search for "heritage park": https://outgress.com/search/1100/?q=heritage+park&o=relevance
    • Search already requires all keywords in the search (or a derivative of the word... there's word stemming involved where a search for "truck" would also count a match as "trucker"). Along those lines, you can do negative search keywords... for example if you wanted to search for "golden gate", but not include anything with the word "bridge" in it... you could do it like so: "golden gate -bridge"
    • There is an OR operator already... the pipe... example: "Seminary | Convent | Monastery"
    • Free form regex for users isn't going to happen... can do bad things (like loops, malformed queries, etc.) Not to mention regex queries against the search engine would be just plain slow.
    You can also use quotes for literal searches... for example search for "san diego state" with and without the quotes.
     
    digitalpoint, May 13, 2016
    #5
  6. PaTChBuZ006+outgress

    PaTChBuZ006+outgress New Member Enlightened L14

    Thanks for taking to time to research this and reply. It's good to see how much passion you put into this project.
    I had the impression that the most popular/active portals were returned especially when an exact match was less popular . The search term would in those cases only be an exact match of the partial name. Lot of portals out there and nearby with relatively boring names.

    I will certainly try the "negative" and "or" operators

    Many thanks.
     
    Last edited: May 13, 2016
    PaTChBuZ006+outgress, May 13, 2016
    #6
  7. digitalpoint

    digitalpoint Administrator Staff Member Illuminator Enlightened L15

    For searching, it doesn't favor attacks in at all. It's purely based on title and address text. Titles are weighted 3x higher than addresses (will return matching titles before matching addresses), and exact matches/phrases will return higher than non-exact matches.

    Ideally I'd like to weight portal search results to give higher priority to portals that are closer to the user, but in order to do that, you need to internally calculate the distance relative to the user's location for every portal in the system for every search. Which works fine for a small number of portals, but doesn't scale well the more portals you have so that idea was nixed.
     
    digitalpoint, May 13, 2016
    #7