Have any of you tried to use the soLinkable search before? If not, consider yourself lucky. It sucked. I mean, REALLY sucked.

Thankfully, that’s starting to change. We’ve slowly been implementing upgrades to our search algorithm with the goal of eventually developing a search function that actually allows you to find what you’re looking for (crazy, I know).

The first thing you’ll notice are the new options available. You can now drill down to make your search a little more specific: category, where, when, and sorting method are all available filters. But don’t let these major design changes fool you – There were also plenty of improvements behind the scenes. We made significant upgrades, giving us better search results, in less time, with fewer calls.

Let me take you through a simple search as an example. Say we were looking for a specific Google Maps post which is ~10 months old.

First off, I’m not sure what category it would be under. Maybe Internet, but maybe technology – I don’t know. So, I’ll just leave it as “All Categories”.

Next, I know “Google Maps” will be mentioned in either the title or content, so I’ll choose “Title and Description”. Simple enough. To get the most relevant search result first, I’ll sort “By Relevance”. And finally, it’s about 10 months old, or, “<365 Days”, which represents “less than 365 days”. This leaves me with the following search query:

Hitting enter I will see the following results…

I see it! 10 Top Overlooked Features of Google Maps – Exactly what I was looking for!

We’re not done yet, there are still many more upgrades to come. However we decided to offer the first batch of changes sooner due to the general crappiness of the search functionality.

But don’t just take my word for it, Try it out yourself and see the difference!

bug, fix, search