filtrbox blog

Previously, Filtrbox treated any two words together in a Filtr as a quoted phrase automatically. While this was helpful early-on for our users, it also created its own problems because it was more difficult to obtain results where the two words you wanted to search for existed in the article, but not together. We followed this pattern based on the user behavior we observed and wanted to be pro-active in helping our customers get the results they were looking for. We’ve kept an eye on this area for awhile because we knew it didn’t conform to search box standards. For example, if you set up a Filtr for Apple Computer and did not use quotes, the system automatically treated your Filtr AS IF it was “Apple Computer”, where only results that had those two words together would be considered valid. In the image below, there are no quotes even though on the back-end the system applied the quotes.

Old way:

The Filtrbox search system was just updated to allow more flexibility with quotes and handle multiple words in the Filtr (without quoting them automatically).  We should have done a better job of explaining the way this worked before, and we’ll communicate more proactively in the future on this topic. This updated approach gives you far more control and granularity for your searches. As of today, if you want to search for something specific such as a company name, a person, or a popular phrase, you need to use quotes to identify that you only want results that have the exact match.

New Way:

Alternately, if you want to find  articles that have a several words in them, and not necessarily together, you can just leave a space between the words in the Filtr. For example if you are interested in green building projects in California, your Filtr would look like this;

In this scenario, you’ll see articles that have all of these words present, but you are not looking for any exact phrases. In the near future we will further enhancing the Filtr manager to obtain better results for more complex searches, so stay tuned for another blog post on this topic.