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[ravencallscrows]

Searching the Live Journal community more than one interest at a time

Summary

To enable Live Journal users to quickly and conveniently identify other users with more than one common interest.

Prototype

Prototype added 22 March.

Scenarios

Al is a Live Journal user who has diverse interests. He would like to be able to find other users who share those interests while not having to sort through the lists of members who share each particular one. By allowing him to search two interests at a time, he can quickly and efficiently locate members with multiple shared common interests.

When using the new and improved search feature, he is able to enter Fire-spinning, select a Boolean AND, and Seattle. When he submits this, the query is passed to the database and returns only the members who list both in their individual interests.

Danielle is also a Live Journal community member. She’s often annoyed when searching by interests in the current implementation, because some of her interests are well-formed, but best described by words which can be interpreted in larger terms. Allowing her to search on Paganism NOT Wicca enables her to quickly identify other users who have similar interests but doesn’t burden her with as many undesirable returns.

Design Goals and Justification for the Service or Feature

Currently, it’s an exceedingly tedious process to find other Live Journal community members with common interests, since presently the only search by interests option allows a user to search on a single interest. In the case of more common search queries, the number of users who include a particular interest is so great as to result in a return of “There are <n> people and/or communities listing this as an interest. A list won’t be shown.”

Attempting to pass more than a single item into the current form returns an error as well.

Since the form presently available returns a message saying “Interest not found” when he tries to submit two interests with a Boolean value (AND, OR, NOT, XOR, +, etc.), it is apparent that the current implementation is insufficient.

By improving the existing search feature to allow multiple field entries and common Boolean logic, it will be much simpler and quicker for members of the Live Journal community to find each other, resulting in increased growth and prolonged interest in the service.

Value Proposition

Searching is currently supported in Live Journal.
Unfortunately, since it is currently only possible to search on one interest at a time, it’s a time consuming and tedious process to isolate individuals with common interests or define a particular interest past a “sound bite” blanket description.

Dependencies and Partners

The current database used for returning interests uses SQL. Accordingly, any way of submitting well-formed SQL queries, whether in a client application, or from a web form should allow for the service to be broadened without jeopardizing the integrity of the database.