|
StockCharts' "secret shame" is now a thing of the past...
For far too long we have not had a unified site search tool for our website. Oh sure, we had lots of boxes labelled "Search" scattered throughout the site. But each of them gave deferent results! The search box on the homepage gave results from some areas of the site - the search box on the Support page gave different results. The search box in the blog area gave still different results and, if you wanted to search for a stock symbol, you needed to use the search in the Symbol Catalog area. Did I mention that s.c.a.n. had yet another search tool built into it?
Chaos! Utter chaos!
Most people either muddled through or gave up trying to use our search boxes because the results just didn't make sense.
No longer!
Today, I'm very happy to announce the official launch of our new site search feature. If I was smarter, we'd have given it a nifty name like "Siri" or "Jeeves" but instead, we're just going to call it "Search" and I encourage you to try it out.
The easiest way to try it out is to use the "Search the Site" box on the right side of our homepage. Just type in your question and press the "Search" button.
In addition to that "boring" way I wanted to tell you about the "super power user" trick that gives you access to a "secret" search box built into all of our pages! Just click on the dropdown in the "Create a Chart" bar at the top of any page (the dropdown normally says "SharpChart") and select "Site Search" instead. Then enter your search phrase into the text box beside the dropdown and click "Go!" Voila! Now you can search for anything from anywhere.
When you look at the new search results page, you'll notice several new features including colored icons that tell you at a glance which area of our website each search result comes from. You'll also see a highlighted date for any results that come from a dated blog article. Finally, be sure to check out the row of "section tabs" at the top of the search box. You can click on any of them to look at results from just that part of our site. When in doubt, just make sure that "Everything" is clicked.
Here are some other things you might not notice at first:
- Results from the s.c.a.n. user-to-user help area are sorted based on the votes that both the question and the top answers have received so, in theory, the higher the s.c.a.n. article in the search results, the more popular it was with the s.c.a.n. community.
- In many cases, when you click on a search result to view the original article, your search terms will be highlighted in yellow when you view that article.
- Results from the Public ChartList area are sorted based on the popularity of the ChartList containing the result.
- You can create advanced scans with AND and OR logic. There's a link explaining how to do that directly under the Search box on the Search results page.
- You can type in natural language questions in the search box and we'll do a pretty good job of answering them - not always perfect - but actually pretty darn good in many cases.
So, stop overlooking that loney "Search" box on our web pages. It may still look the same, but it is now MUCH more powerful than it has every been.
- Chip
