You're Now Competing With The Internet

That “Full Text Search Wins” certainly resonates with me. Why is it that when I type a 10 digit number on a site that is indexing books, the search can’t figure out that it’s an ISBN?

Why do many search pages have the audacity to have an “Advanced Search” link, when it in fact should be titled “Hold the search engine’s hand and help it search for this”.

And it’s not just internal apps. If I need API documentation, I have a command line alias that automatically submits a (used to be Google) Live Search query on the msdn.microsoft.com domain. It was actually faster to start IE and submit a query to search.live.com than it is to run the MSDN help viewer that’s installed on my dev box.

Criminy!

If only this were the case. Unfortunately many of our clients DEMAND searches with upteen fields as opposed to a “single search box”. Sometimes I feel like pulling them kicking and screaming into UI bliss, but other times, I give in…

“Seriously. I call up, authenticate, get transferred, and have to authenticate again to that next rep. Why? It smacks of crappy internal integration (i.e. a simplistic app used internally that doesn’t tie into the phone system).”

Yup - spent eight weeks trying to sort out a car insurance claim and had to confirm my address at the start of every one of the numerous phone calls involved. When they finally got round to mailing me important information, they sent it to the wrong house!

Comparing to Google search certainly is unfair, the average web application can’t compete with that by far either.
Actually, it goes so far, that to search for something e.g. from Microsoft I use Google to search for “… site:microsoft.com” instead of their own search, because that one is just crap in comparison.
And they actually do already have real search engine technology…

Seems someone should program de programmers to write good software from the start :smiley:

Google is common place nowadays, its googla here in my langauge.

A lot of things has changed the last 10 years.

I work in a company that creates internal apps that work over the internet, thus solving all problems! The future is here!

I have some sympathy for the author, note “some” . . . not a lot.

I’ve had the opposite experience. I wrote an app for bringing up a person’s information from a database that had several ways to look up that info. There was a unique id which always got you that data in one step, and you could also search by name ([last name], [first and last] or [last, first]) telephone number (7 or 10 digit, hyphens and spaces optional) or email address. These latter items gave a list of matches (and trust me, there were PLENTY of matches coming out of the database) and the user would have to sort through those to get what he wanted.

I wrote it with a single text box - it figured out what you had typed in and did the appropriate search for you. A very common response from the beta was that the users wanted a dropdown menu so they could indicate what they were searching. They seemed to want control over how the search functioned, even though none of the input types had the same formatting, making the dropdown completely redundant.

if users want google type searching, recommend they install google servers on their network and integrate. The Internet means we as developers must utilize other peoples systems in order to succeed. In the same way we don’t start writing a new dataaccess tier for each project (I.e we use ado.net or jdbc etc), we must use what’s available to us.

P.s why you don’t want an iPhone yet? Jeff , come on!

I’m very lucky. All the code I write is for applications used only by me. (And occasionally my boss if I’m off to have surgery for a week; as I have this past week. He mucks things up, but he tries so I give him credit for that.) I don’t have to interact with people as well so…OMG!!! I have the perfect job!

But those of you who write code for others to use? Qwitcher bitchen and write what tour customer wants or they’ll go elsewhere. Then your job will be extraneous.

And Jeff? Why “no HTML”???

I don’t get it. Well obviously if internal software competes with any shrink-wrapped product (be it MS Office or an equally polished internet application) the outcome will be clear. So what? Internal software is developed simply to the point of getting things done. Anything else would be just a waste of resources.
This of course does should not imply badly written code / bugs / no testing and so on.

An internal programmer.

I don’t use software unless I have the code. Trust no one.

‘You want better search? Fine! You have the source, add it yourself!’
…or did you get /money/ involved?

There is no such thing as a digital product in the future. There is only service. Think fast-- in some places, the future is already here.

Having started my career making web applications, I find the resistance to ‘functional design’ in traditional apps to be profound. Project heads, system and business analysts and all of their ilk have an ‘old school’ approach to development. What I have learned through years of web app development is that the puzzle is usually solved faster by starting at the finish line (the end user experience). This does not mean we need to abandon good data management, but what good is data management when the user hates using the software? hmmmmm…

Let’s be honest here. Good software is software that sells - software that users like. My personal geek opinion should be sequestered to my geeky social network. My professional opinion should rely heavily on those innocent folk that have to use what I create. Many of my colleagues think that this is ‘dumbing down’ the UI. I believe that the reciprocal of this is true. When we make software that is intuitive and easy to use… with a small or non-existent learning curve, we are actually ‘smartening-up’ the software.

We have to stop thinking the entire world should be obsessed with the order in which tiny little electrons race through tiny little wires. If, for some reason the populous decides we have been right all along, and those electrons ARE the sum of our happy existence, we will spend our days in the unemployment lines, or worse yet… using software an non-geek created!

I believe we as programmers have a moral obligation to make our users hate their jobs. The more people quit their jobs, the better. Tell me, who really profits at all from this survival-of-the-fittest stampede towards nothing?

Haha, I used to have the multi-field search page on my biggest internal application, and I eventually got rid of it in favor of full-text. No complaints since then, and I don’t even consider a multi-field search anymore.

Google forced me to learn AJAX, Wikipedia showed me how to lay out information in an attractive and readable fashion, Amazon showed me how to serve products to users based on demographics, and YouTube and Flickr showed me the value of an open folksonomy. If anything, we should be thanking these guys for inventing the wheel before we have to.

I know I may sound like a tool for using the ideas of others, but I’m only one developer, and although I consider myself smarter than the average bear, I can’t compete with the best development teams on the web who are fueled by all sorts of RD and probably even have THEIR OWN TESTING TEAMS. Wow, that would be nice.

Did no one else recognize the original source of the “Ha ha I’m using the internet!!!1” picture?

good post!

All software sucks. I try to make mine suck less. I often fail.

It is, however, the ability to admit failure in this that is the first step to making it better. If the users of the software say that they would like it a certain way, you must help them. However, it is often not best to just do it like they ask, but instead, to know WHY they want it like they do, in order to not meet, but instead exceed their expectation. Often with less work on your part.

For instance, the users claim they need to be able to edit closed financial transactions. Instead of removing that edit, perhaps, you need to fix the place where it did it wrong to begin with so that they no longer need to edit them. Everyone wins.

Its better to buy a platform and then input your business needs to it. After that, you get new versions of the platform in a box and can concentrate in updating your business needs. You should only need one (1) platform that rules them all.