CocoaPods/cocoapods.org — Issue #4: FYI: Short overview of main Picky features
Author: floere
Created: 2011-11-15 12:12:08+00:00
State: open
Labels: search engine

Mainly a writeup for Thijs.

Picky basically is a semantic filtering search engine.

1. (Look) The standard interface looks like this: http://podsearch.herokuapp.com/

2. (Live results) You get results as you type. This changes the class of the thing to the left, which makes it go red/orange/green. For example, start typing "osx networking" slowly. Red means: No results. Orange means: Picky will need some feedback on what you might mean. Green means: Picky will return a nice fresh batch of results for immediate consumption.

3. (More results) Type "osx" (http://podsearch.herokuapp.com/?q=osx). Scroll down. Press "More results". Picky inserts a header of what kind of result is shown below and adds the results.

4. (What do you mean?) Type "ios" (http://podsearch.herokuapp.com/?q=ios). Select if you meant the system or not.

5. (Preselection of category) Type "on:ios" or "platform:ios" (http://podsearch.herokuapp.com/?q=platform%3Aosx). This avoids "What do you mean?" above. The category names are freely chosen. Multiple categories can be preselected using the , as separator.

6. (Partial search) Type "s" (http://podsearch.herokuapp.com/?q=s). It finds "s*" in multiple categories.

7. (Similarity search) Type "keewi~" (http://podsearch.herokuapp.com/?q=keewi~). Picky will return similar results.

8. (Version search using partials) Type "1." (http://podsearch.herokuapp.com/?q=1.). Find all versions starting with 1. Type "0.9.3" (http://podsearch.herokuapp.com/?q=0.9.3) find only pods with 0.9.3 as version.

9. (Dependency search) Type "using:json" (http://podsearch.herokuapp.com/?q=using%3Ajson). Find pods that use pods named json.

10. (Combinations) Type "networking json" (http://podsearch.herokuapp.com/?q=networking%20json). Finds a pod that uses json, and has networking in its description.

An idea:
* Want to only return results from the platform osx? Just prepend "on:osx" to a search.

See the simple source and HTML structure here, including some JS options (on Chrome):
view-source:http://podsearch.herokuapp.com/

Questions? -> @floere or https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/picky-ruby.

More here http://florianhanke.com/picky/, geo search etc.

Have fun! :)