Navigation | ||
My WhyNot? | ||
Icon Key | ||||||||||||
The community's level of support for this idea is...
| ||||||||||||
Cascading search | |||||||||||||||||
I use this myself a lot in my own software, but I've not seen it in other author's. I enter a search term and the software searches by the first method (say, family name). If nothing is found, it searches by another method (street name/city). If not there, try something else (friends/associates). If you choose the list of search methods appropriately for the application/program, it's surprisingly efficient.
nihil, Oct 01 2007
What do you think of this idea or comment?
| |||||||||||||||||
I agree
No opinion
I disagreeUsers who liked this idea also liked: | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Add your comment
What you're describing is more of a parallel search than a cascading search. A cascading search is as follows. I search for "Choral Sheet Music". I search within the results for "PDF file". I search within the results for "Free Download". I search within those results for "A Cappella". I search within those results for "TTBB". I search within those results for "Sacred". By now, my hits have gone from numbering in the billions to one or two if I'm lucky. Now, looking at the above set of criteria, you can probably see that sometimes a parallel search would have served my purposes better than a cascading search. Yet some of my criteria are clearly subordinate to others on my list. To date, I've never seen anybody offer a consolidated parallel search in which the results from search "A" are compared with the results of search "B" such that the overlapping data is given priority over the data that does not overlap. Furthermore, I've yet to see anybody offer cascading searches (search within results) with any degree of sincerity. I would think a combined approach (cascading and parallel searches) would be the ultimate solution, whatever your search problem may be.