Release Announcement: Advanced Search, New Video Player, Mobile Redirect

We've just released two sets of changes to the site:

1. Advanced Search: We've restored the advanced search to the top/center of the page, and also restored the username and title search functions (they are now text entry fields) and improved the date refinement options.

2. Mobile: we've removed the redirect that was causing direct links to pages within the site (from google, etc) to redirect users to the homepage. Direct links should now lead to the correct page.

3. Video: We've completed the release of a new video player throughout the site- details are provided here: http://chowhound.chow.com/topics/619621

We hope you enjoy these improvements/changes, and please let us know if you encounter any problems or have any suggestions about them.

Thanks!

JustineR in Site Talk

Changes to Tags, Contextual Recommendations, Search

The engineering team's first priority the past several weeks has been to address the site stability problems we were experiencing, and they have made good progress with that. They have also been fixing many of the bugs noted in this this thread, and those are slated for a release next week. I will itemize what those fixes are early next week and post an update.

Thanks for your continued feedback.

JustineR in Site Talk

Changes to Tags, Contextual Recommendations, Search

Are you seeing this problem intermittently or consistently? I have not been able to replicate it-- I am finding things appearing after 5 minutes, which is what should be happening. can you give me an example of something that is not refreshing and i will investigate? Thanks.

JustineR in Site Talk

Changes to Tags, Contextual Recommendations, Search

- Yes, the places region searches are broken, engineers are working on fixing those now.

- Posts are supposed to be indexed every 5 minutes, so I'm not sure why that post is not showing up. We'll test this further to ensure that it's working as it should.

JustineR in Site Talk

Changes to Tags, Contextual Recommendations, Search

i am seeing the Orchard farm/orchard farms search working- returning the correct result as the first result on both searches. Can you let me know what exact path you are following so we can replicate the issue?

JustineR in Site Talk

Changes to Tags, Contextual Recommendations, Search

We will fix that. Thanks.

JustineR in Site Talk

Changes to Tags, Contextual Recommendations, Search

They are not there yet because of the performance/stability issues we were experiencing. We will be adding them as soon as those issues are resolved.

JustineR in Site Talk

Changes to Tags, Contextual Recommendations, Search

Thanks for the thoughtful feedback. We're aware of the problems with places search, and we're working to fix them. And, there will be changes coming to places in the next few months that will improve this experience, and we will solicit input from users as we put those changes in place.

JustineR in Site Talk

Changes to Tags, Contextual Recommendations, Search

The problem of the search phrase not being included in the search box has been fixed.

We will fix the issue of the quoted phrase search highlighting terms that are not the exact quoted phrase, and the stopword highlighting too.

JustineR in Site Talk

Changes to Tags, Contextual Recommendations, Search

As noted in the initial post, the previous search helpers like title: user: etc no longer function. but i searched for Tse Yang (without title) on Manhattan board and got the following: http://search.chow.com/search?query=Tse+Yang&advanced=1&type=Topic&from_date=10+years+ago&to_date=now&sort_mode=newest&search_boardgroup_id=8&search_board_id=18

Can you let me know what thread you wanted to come up so we can look into how to improve the relevance?

JustineR in Site Talk

Changes to Tags, Contextual Recommendations, Search

Thanks for the feedback, and yes we will return the advanced search to the top of the page.

JustineR in Site Talk

Changes to Tags, Contextual Recommendations, Search

This is a bug, we'll investigate & fix.

JustineR in Site Talk

Changes to Tags, Contextual Recommendations, Search

Thanks for your feedback, we are aware of the slowness & stability issues and are working to fix them as quickly as possible. Thanks for your patience.

JustineR in Site Talk

Changes to Tags, Contextual Recommendations, Search

Thanks for your feedback, we will fix the issues you reported in that thread.

JustineR in Site Talk

Places Hub Search Snafu

Thanks for your feedback, we will fix these issues as soon as possible.

JustineR in Site Talk

Changes to Tags, Contextual Recommendations, Search

Later today we will release a series of enhancements to the site. Please note, links below will not work until we launch...

* Contextual Recommendations: We are now presenting contextually relevant suggestions of related CHOW & Chowhound content on story, recipe, and Chowhound thread pages on the site. So, if a user is reading a thread or story about cheese, they will be able to easily view additional content about cheese. We hope that this will help users to discover additional content that might interest them.

Examples:
http://chowhound.chow.com/topics/518970
http://www.chow.com/stories/11316

* Auto-Tagging & Tags Pages
We have added 5,000 new tag pages to the site, that collect all content related to a given keyword on one page. We are linking to these pages from the contextual recommendations module described above, and also within the body of the text on the story & recipe pages.

Examples:
http://chow.com/tags/cheese
http://chow.com/tags/dungeness+crab

* Changes to Search
We've moved the site to a new search system, with improved relevance, and cleaner design. The main changes you will notice are:
- Advanced search options are now in the right column, rather than in the center where they were before. Functionality is the same.
- You will not see the details of board, date and poster on the main "All Results" tab of search, but it is all available under the "Boards" tab.
- Text search options such as User:Username and Board:Boardname are no longer available, we will restore them in the next release, in the interim, searching by username in quotes should return all posts for that user.
- If you have bookmarked searches, they will no longer work, so you will need to reset them.

Examples:
http://search.chow.com/search?query=soup+dumplings&advanced=&type=Topic&from_date=10+years+ago&to_date=now&sort_mode=newest&search_boardgroup_id=8&search_board_id=18

We are going to be improving and refining these features over the next several weeks, so please let us know if you have any suggestions or notice problems, or there are tags you'd like to see added to the site. We really hope that you'll enjoy these new features, and that this will help you find what you are looking for and discover additional relevant content you didn't know was on the site.

JustineR in Site Talk

Hoke's BBQ--Denver

M&D's place page

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M&D's Fish & BBQ Cafe
2004 E 28th Ave, Denver, CO 80205

JustineR in Southwest

Policy Change: Survey Popups

We have changed our policy on popups. We continue to disallow regular advertisements in popup form, but we are going to begin to accept survey popups that accompany advertising campaigns on the site. These surveys are becoming a standard in the industry, and our advertisers depend on them to measure the performance of their marketing efforts. As an advertiser-supported site, we want and need to do business with these advertisers, and support their efforts as they are supporting ours. And, we feel that the popup surveys are significantly less intrusive than many other forms of advertising that we do not allow.

If you encounter any technical problems, please let us know by replying to this thread on Technical Help: http://www.chowhound.com/topics/496072 and we will investigate.
Thanks,
Justine, Product Manager for Chowhound

JustineR in Site Talk