Our updated search page.
Late last night we shipped a new version of TeachStreet.com with some significant changes to our search capabilities. I spoke our CTO, about it. His response was a mixture of geek speak and technical terms rarely seen outside of a Trekkie convention (no offense — live long and prosper, bro). After a half hour of diagrams, wrinkled foreheads, and me asking, “Okay, so what does that mean in English?”, I was finally beginning to understand our search mechanism. That was until Fred mentioned that our old search was limited by “constrained polygons.”
Yeah, I know. I was confused, too, which promptly led to this exchange:
Me: What the heck is a constrained polygon?
Geek: You don’t know what a polygon is?
Me: Of course I know what a polygon is, but what would it have to be constrained about?
Apparently, “constrained polygons” refers to the areas on a map that we can search. Let’s say you’re looking for a yoga class in a specific zip code of Seattle. Before, our search mechanism would divide the city into huge shapes (polygons) to reflect those zip codes and return results to you from within those shapes. The problem was, those polygons didn’t always cover all of a city – but we were constrained by them. As much as we wanted, there was no information available for the parts of the region not covered by the polygons. Ergo, search was limited by constrained polygons.
But now, thanks to our engineering team of programmers (and their own devious search algorithms), we’re free of those pesky constrained polygons. We can show you all the search results in an area without being limited by shapes. City boundaries aren’t a problem, either. We can show classes that are near you, even if that means that they’re technically not part of your town or region (imagine if you live on the outskirts of town, or if you are on the border between two neighborhoods. Something might be 2 blocks away, but in another part of town).
So, phew. I understood our search algorithm! … Until, of course, he told me that searches in a particular area are inversely proportional to the area you’re looking at.
I know, I know, I might as well be speaking Greek. Or Romulan. Basically, that means that in addition to our geographic search area not being constrained by polygons, it also generously captures regions just outside of the area you are looking in.
The other big advancement we made to search is that you can now search for teachers by name in addition to the old ways of looking up things by class title or topic.
In short, it’s now super easy to find the classes you want in your area. Whether you understand the entire process behind it, or think that it’s the cause of little tiny men who live in your computer (like me), you’ll probably like our new search capabilities. So check them out, and, as always, let us know what you think.
—
If you liked this post, recommend it to a colleague and/or click here to get updates via email or RSS. You can also follow us on Twitter, too.