Limiting output when searching.

Sorry

misplaced comment

… john and jane balaban, 13 March, 2010 - 9:33pm

We don't know about limiting the number

of images, except by being more specific in your search request. But if you click on the Search tab before entering anything in the search box, you can limit what the search returns to just guide pages, for example, which will be a very small number of entries.

… john and jane balaban, 14 August, 2008 - 10:32pm

I agree with the original post

There really should be some way of breaking the output up into small chunks. Not only is this good for the user for the reasons stated by the original poster, it should also cut down on unnecessary bandwidth usage, since people probably don't -need- to see all of the results most of the time in order to find what they were looking for. (And if they're like me, they get sidetracked into looking at other search results pretty early on anyway, so the later results really don't need to be displayed, at least not at first.)

I don't know what kind of content management system this site uses or what language it's written in, but I have some programming experience and am very careful when editing someone else's code to add a feature or make things work differently. I'd be willing to see what I could do to add a feature like the one requested here, if the site's administrators/owners are interested.

-- Sid

… Sid Shakal, 28 September, 2008 - 2:33pm

search limited, partial work-around (Google)

Answering some comments further up.
BugGuide system is based on Drupal, mostly. Others can give you more details. A major code rewrite, called BugGuide 2.0, is underway (or completed?). A lot had been hanging on that.
The search function has always been very limited, and this has been discussed. I don't know what the status of search features is in BugGuide 2.0, perhaps others will comment.
When frustrated with the internal search feature for such reasons as mentioned above, I simply use Google. If you type your search terms followed by "site:bugguide.net" (no quotes) into Google, you will get pages of links to BugGuide pages matching those terms, though the indexing seems imprecise sometimes. This also works for images. (However Google's image indexing is way behind text indexing.)
Using Google in this manner provides some of the desired functions lacking in the BugGuide internal search.

… Cotinis, 28 September, 2008 - 10:15pm