While it was common twenty years ago to find information based on codes and file numbers (of course 2003-03-C-03 meant the third complaint in March of 2003!), Google has taught the modern world to find information by searching for it.
Our engineering team have been working hard over the last few months to make it easier to find and sort your information, firstly with our upgraded List & Filter screens. Today, we're announcing the beta release of a much more powerful search interface - a sort of "Google for your company" which delivers real-time, plain text search results across everything in your Accelo account through one, simple, powerful search box.
Currently in beta - email [email protected] if you'd like to join - the new "super search" feature can be activated by pressing the forward-slash key "/". From here, the world is your oyster! Type anything to kick-off a search. Within a couple of seconds you'll see results - and not just a random list based on whatever data came back first, but a carefully ranked list of records based on some clever rules.
The tabs across the top reveal the number of results across the various parts of your platform (this example is fully loaded) so you can narrow down the results with a click. Other objects we can't fit across the top are available via the More link. You'll see we've worked hard to ensure almost everything is included in the super-search results!
With regards to the ranking/priority, we've taken care to be smart, surfacing a client account ahead of an email that mentioned the same word from years ago. We're also able to match on the comments/notes field for most objects - which will increase the likelihood of getting relevant results when combined with matching on titles. A big part of our reason for making this a beta that we have to "turn on" for you rather than just throw at everyone, aside from wanting to manage load and performance carefully, it to get real feedback on where we should be looking to tweak our result ranking algorithms.
You'll also note that the underlying search algorithm we're using has some support for boolean operators, like as "cheese OR ham", "website NOT design".
If you hate moving your hands from their home on the keyboard, you'll also love the shortcuts to filter by type. For example, the string "is:task design" will limit the search to finding only tasks with the "design" keyword.
Since we're releasing this is as a beta today we're mainly going to be focusing on optimizing the indexing, ranking and results experience on both the back end and front end. If you'd like to share your feedback, email [email protected] - we'd love to hear it!
