36 replies to this topic

[G-Man]

OT Market on Yates makes a great cinnamon bun and if you want something a little lighter the cinnamon cross from Bond Bonds is amazing.

[Gary H]

... We have redesigned the home page to focus solely on our search function. We still have a lot left to do on the search function itself, but at least now we think it is clear that you should search for something to try out our site before you just look at a confusing page and leave.

We will be tweaking the search algorithm to give less importance to the restaurant name. Currently if you search for "pizza" you will be getting back salads and other entrees from places like Boston Pizza. Obviously that is not a good way to handle things. We will also be placing filters and sort features on the search page.

I think you'll need to not just "give less importance to the restaurant name" but have some hard filters to really improve your search results. Some of the additional scenarios in the search feedback here made me think quoted phrases and one more filter category is needed:

_______________________________________ SEARCH

Tip: enclose phrases in quotes, i.e. "cheese plate".

Search For:
(x) Dishes ( ) Restaurants

Search In:
[x] ALL [ ] Dish Names [ ] Dish Descriptions [ ] Restaurant Names [ ] Restaurant Cuisines

Sort By:
(x) Trending ( ) Alphabetical

Location:
[Neighborhood - All]

I think this minimal set of filters would give you accurate search results for every type of search mentioned in this thread. The default selections above would yield your current results. The additional filters would provide accurate results for the more traditional queries. For example:

tedwad's search for pizza restaurants in James Bay:
Pizza SEARCH
Search For:
( ) Dishes (x) Restaurants
Search In:
[ ] ALL [ ] Dish Names [ ] Dish Descriptions [x] Restaurant Names [x] Restaurant Cuisines
Sort By:
(x) Trending ( ) Alphabetical
Location:
[James Bay]
- You would just return a list of restaurants that have either "pizza" in their name or their cuisine tag. Similarly, Bernard's searches for "African", "Mediterranean", and "Polish" would be done with the same filters, but for the location.

Bernard's search for rabbit dishes:
Rabbit SEARCH
Search For:
(x) Dishes ( ) Restaurants
Search In:
[ ] ALL [ ] Dish Names [x] Dish Descriptions [ ] Restaurant Names [ ] Restaurant Cuisines
Sort By:
(x) Trending ( ) Alphabetical
Location:
[Neighborhood - ALL]
- A dish name may contain "rabbit" but not actually be a rabbit dish. In this case only the dish description would be an accurate way to search and the results are dependent on having detailed accurate descriptions - completely doable in your crowd sourced model.

Bernard's search for cheese plate dishes:
"cheese plate" SEARCH
Search For:
(x) Dishes ( ) Restaurants
Search In:
[ ] ALL [x] Dish Names [x] Dish Descriptions [ ] Restaurant Names [ ] Restaurant Cuisines
Sort By:
(x) Trending ( ) Alphabetical
Location:
[Neighborhood - ALL]
- Using quotes for phrases will make searching for things like "cheese plate" dishes much more accurate. Otherwise, it's anything with "cheese" or "plate".

... What do you think of the ability to enter in keywords you don't want to have included in your search result?

This won't be needed if you implement something like the hard filters above. Further, excluding things like dish ingredients doesn't make much sense since you can exclude them when you order a dish.

... The problem with these broad searches is that we have over 35,000 items in our database. If you're searching for one word phrases it is increasingly difficult to provide you with great results...

That's why you have to use hard filters to specify which database records to search on. No amount of algorithm tweaking will enable you to read a user's mind.

[cakeman]

What do you think of the ability to enter in keywords you don't want to have included in your search result?

This won't be needed if you implement something like the hard filters above. Further, excluding things like dish ingredients doesn't make much sense since you can exclude them when you order a dish.

No offense intended, any chance you misunderstand his statement or arent familiar with Boolean operations in search?

When dealing with a large number of search results (ie: google, ebay) detailing what you DONT want is (imho) more useful than being more specific about what you do want..

To stay on a food-based topic.. lets say I searched dish names for Burgers .. and got dozens of results returned, pages filled with listings for bacon cheeseburgers, with the occasional non-bacon cheese related result scattered within..

If I searched ' burger -bacon -cheese ' it would return all the results I got for 'burgers' but remove anything with the words bacon and cheese in the title.. so id get fewer pages to have to sift through for what I want..

More on point for me is ebay.. where if you're searching for old car parts you get tons of these chinese retailers selling random car related generic garbage that theyve declared will 'fit' the vehicle you're working on..so my search for '72 celica' returns 3000 results.. but my search for '72 celica -"seat cover" -"light bulb" -"tacky random garbage" ' returns 30 results more or less focused on what I actually want..

I wish more search engines allowed booleans.

That being said.. a word of caution to the Forkjoy co-owner fellow here.. the public are, generally, simple. When I mention boolean operator use on google to non-nerd people I know, their eyes gloss over and they get confused... and this applies to both young and old. So as much as adding stuff like that appeals to the nerd, the average joe may not get it.

cakes..

[VicHockeyFan]

That being said.. a word of caution to the Forkjoy co-owner fellow here.. the public are, generally, simple. When I mention boolean operator use on google to non-nerd people I know, their eyes gloss over and they get confused... and this applies to both young and old. So as much as adding stuff like that appeals to the nerd, the average joe may not get it.

cakes..

Good call.

[Gary H]

No offense intended, any chance you misunderstand his statement or arent familiar with Boolean operations in search?

None taken cakes.

When dealing with a large number of search results (ie: google, ebay) detailing what you DONT want is (imho) more useful than being more specific about what you do want..

I think the real issue is Forkjoy's search implementation, not search in general. I agree that for large databases boolean NOT operations can be useful. Even more powerful would be to support regular expression searches - but imagine explaining how to do that to normal users!

As a Forkjoy user I actually think these guys are on to something here. It's like having your own personal concierge with all the menus in one place with pictures of all the popular dishes (eventually). Plus its open/crowd sourced so users can constantly make it better. Heck, they even use open/crowd sourced maps via MapBox which gets their data from OpenSourceMap which I also contribute to. They just have this annoying little issue with search results.

From what I can tell, Forkjoy made a design decision to by default search their entire dataset with queries built from doing a Boolean AND on the entered keywords and then using a simple trending algorithm to sort the results. My suggestions for improvement simply recommended including filters to target queries on specific types of records in the database. Now their trending sort will be applied to truly relevant results.

Actually, and I'm just speculating here, I think manifest asked about the exclude list as a quick and dirty way to improve their results without making significant search engine changes. "Pizza" was returning calzones and wraps because they were trending higher, so lets just provide an easy way to exclude them. I think better to take the long view and allow users check a few filter boxes to focus the search on specific data types.

To stay on a food-based topic.. lets say I searched dish names for Burgers .. and got dozens of results returned, pages filled with listings for bacon cheeseburgers, with the occasional non-bacon cheese related result scattered within..

If I searched ' burger -bacon -cheese ' it would return all the results I got for 'burgers' but remove anything with the words bacon and cheese in the title.. so id get fewer pages to have to sift through for what I want..

My reasoning was that menu items are built from ingredients that are usually excluded at the time of order - "I'll have a monster burger and hold the cheese." So is it really useful to search for burgers, or pizzas, or whatever by excluding toppings or ingredients? I would argue that in Forkjoy's case it will always be more efficient to specify what you want than what you don't want.

I suppose you could argue "What if I just wanted to find the ultimate cheese pizza?" Well, you could search for "pizza" and if you had an exclude list also enter all the toppings you can think of. Or, you could simply enter the phrase "cheese pizza" that may yield similar results with a lot less typing (assuming Forkjoy implements quoted phrases). Think of it this way, if you enter the most generic of keywords you are just browsing. I feel like pizza or a burger but I'm not sure what kind so I enter "pizza" or "burger" and see what's trending or popular. If I know what I want, like say a Hawaiian pizza I enter "Hawaiian pizza". Done, what would I need to exclude?

Bottom line, there is no right answer here, we're just providing some input. My two cents is that I think for Forkjoy's specific application, that inclusive filters are more than sufficient and I gave my reasoning. I could be wrong. In any case, Forkjoy wanted to know what we thought of an exclude list, and boy did we tell him.

[vandervalk]

Is there any talk about creating a mobile phone app? I usually end up deciding where I want to eat when I'm not near a computer. I could check the website of course but an app would be great.

Nice work btw.

[Gary H]

You mean like this?

ForkJoy for iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPhone 4S, iPhone 5, iPod touch (3rd generation), iPod touch (4th generation), iPod touch (5th generation) and iPad on the iTunes App Store

[manifest]

Since this discussion has gone to our search results (and cinnamon buns), I am just going to reply in general instead of quoting each of you individually.

We just pushed out another update to the search function on the website. It also fixes the problem Bernard had with searching by tags. Here are a few quick examples: Rabbit, African, Mediterranean, Polish, Cheese Plate

What we've done is added a search operator for tags. If you've clicked on the searches above, you probably noticed that the tags were in square brackets. This tells our site that you are looking for items only tagged with these keywords. For example, if you have a craving for a beef burger with some pork on top of it you can now search for "burger [Pork] [Beef]". From what I've searched so far, it has improved my results quite a bit. We are still working on refining these results, but I feel like we are making pretty big strides so far.

Over the next few days we will be working on an in-depth filter system for searches. Once you perform a search you will be able to filter by a variety of different things. Hopefully this will narrow down the results to something a little more manageable. It's nice being able to figure out all the bugs in Victoria before we launch in larger cities like Vancouver. 35,000 items are a little easier to manage than 350,000.

PS. Cinnamon buns

[Gary H]

...We just pushed out another update to the search function on the website...

No kidding - wow! That's a vast improvement in your search results. A search for pizza returned just pizza dishes, a search for Hawaiian pizza returned just what I expected - and you didn't even need my filters.

Great job!

I would suggest anyone who was turned off by the initial search results give it another go.

[Gary H]

One of the things that's going to make Forkjoy unique, and better than the other restaurant sites IMO, are the dish photos that you tie to menu items. You should be thinking about ways to incentivise users to take and upload dish photos. On your site I'm seeing a lot of restaurant ratings and some dish ratings but very few photo uploads.

Maybe you could work with restaurants to offer a discount coupon after photographing and rating and a certain number of their dishes. Say 10% off you next dessert for photographing and rating two desserts at a restaurant. You'd get 25% off after photographing and rating four desserts. Maybe 50% off anything once you've photographed and rated 6 or more dishes at a restaurant and a 2-for-1 once you reach 10. You get the drift.

Oh, and an improvement I'd like to see is to pop-up the larger dish image when you hover over the thumbnail in the menu list.

[Gary H]

... You should be thinking about ways to incentivise users to take and upload dish photos.

I would add dish comments too. Since your site is dish focused, simply having an up or down rating on a dish is, while better than nothing, incomplete. Why did they like or not like the dish? So the incentives should be to photograph, rate, and comment on a dish. Restaurant ratings are a given but are not the thing that makes your site special.

[Bernard]

It seems improved, I will try again when I get chance, thought that is not today or tomorrow.

Since this discussion has gone to our search results (and cinnamon buns), I am just going to reply in general instead of quoting each of you individually.

We just pushed out another update to the search function on the website. It also fixes the problem Bernard had with searching by tags. Here are a few quick examples: Rabbit, African, Mediterranean, Polish, Cheese Plate

What we've done is added a search operator for tags. If you've clicked on the searches above, you probably noticed that the tags were in square brackets. This tells our site that you are looking for items only tagged with these keywords. For example, if you have a craving for a beef burger with some pork on top of it you can now search for "burger [Pork] [Beef]". From what I've searched so far, it has improved my results quite a bit. We are still working on refining these results, but I feel like we are making pretty big strides so far.

Over the next few days we will be working on an in-depth filter system for searches. Once you perform a search you will be able to filter by a variety of different things. Hopefully this will narrow down the results to something a little more manageable. It's nice being able to figure out all the bugs in Victoria before we launch in larger cities like Vancouver. 35,000 items are a little easier to manage than 350,000.

PS. Cinnamon buns

[manifest]

I know it has been a long time since I posted here, but I figured I would try to get everyone's opinion on our newest feature.

What we have done is released something that we like to call "Time Sensitive Deals". Instead of having a deal that lasts 3-12 months like the other deal sites, we limit the deal redemption period to when the restaurant is in off-peak hours. For example, a restaurant could post "Get $10 off when you spend $20 or more between 1pm and 4pm today." They get the customers at those times and don't have to worry about people coming in to use it during their dinner rush.

Another major difference for our way of doing things is the fact that we don't take all of the restaurant's profit. A standard deal on other sites ($10 for $20) would pay out $10 in savings to the customer, $5 to the restaurant and $5 to the website. We do it differently in the fact that the restaurant gets $10, the customer saves $8 and we charge $2 for the service. This also eliminates the need for servers to verify a redemption code every time they see one. All they need to know is if they see the unique 2 character code, they give that customer the discount.

I would love to answer any questions about this. I'm working on getting the explanation down to 30 seconds so I can pitch it to restaurants (and users).

[FoodLoverNomad]

I have been regularly using ForkJoy for the past few months and I am impressed!

http://www.ForkJoy.com

The focus on individual menu items and nice photos in the setting of complete restaurant info makes your site 'one-stop shopping' (esp. now that the Deals button is there).

It seems that you are no longer charging people to buy deals? This is great for us but how do you make money?

It looks like a lot of people and restaurants are starting to use the site - it will be great to see ForkJoy everywhere I travel!

[manifest]

Thanks for the comments and being an early adopter. We appreciate it. It has proven a bit tougher to create a user base than we first expected. Especially since our current users love the site so much.

We gave all our users 1 free deal last week, but after thinking about it a bit more we have decided to make deals free for the foreseeable future. We can then label the deals as a user acquisition strategy and promote ourselves as a "why would you use Groupon?" service. We obviously don't have the same user base as them, but if we can get some restaurants posting deals on there it would definitely drive people to our site to redeem them. There is really no downside for the restaurant to post a deal. It's free advertising for them and they get to control every aspect of the deal. For example, only being valid between 2 and 4 on a Tuesday. They won't have people coming in on a Saturday night when they don't need it.

Since we won't be making money on the deals anymore, we have decided to work on providing restaurants with services to enhance their online presence. Our first product, coming out next week, is called the "menu widget". We've spent months developing an awesome (in our opinion) menu management system and a logical step was to let restaurants use that as well. The menu widget allows restaurants to fully manage their menus on ForkJoy. Once an item is updated on ForkJoy, it will instantly be changed on their website and Facebook. It's just one line of code that will replace the restaurant's current menu on their website. Our script also takes all of the styling of the restaurant's website and configures itself to make it look like it was built specifically for that website. We're testing it on www.westcoastwaffles.ca/menu.html right now, but here are a few screenshots of what it looks like on other restaurants around town as well.

Fernwood Inn
Glo
Noodle Box
Smoken Bones
Swans
Zambri's

We are also going to be working on handling specials soon. They can be daily, weekly, monthly, etc. What restaurants will be able to do is select which items from their menu (or add a new one) are on sale and add it all to one specials menu. They will then be able to click one button to send that menu to Facebook or Twitter. This is pretty much what restaurants use these sites for currently, so we are trying to make it easier (and better looking) for them.

We'd love to get some feedback on this new idea. Also, if you own a restaurant or know someone who does we'd love to talk .

Thanks,
Mike

[VicHockeyFan]

http://grubthing.com/

 

 

 

GrubGrubThing gives you the low-down before you chow down.

So you want to find some great restaurants near you - you've got plenty of options: Yarp, UrbanSpork, TroughAdvisor.

GrubThing ... isn't those. It's built locally here in Victoria, and consults a restaurant inspections database to help you find the cleanest places to eat.

 

What goes into the GrubRating? The GrubRating is calculated by examining each restaurant's previous inspections. If they have a history of critical violations or high hazard ratings, it will be reflected by a low score. If they are generally responsible and rated as a low hazard in the reports, they will have a higher GrubRating.

[Nparker]

So important it needed to be said twice!