Many of you asked for improvements to our search functionality, and now, finally, Fluther is happy to announce the arrival of faster, more powerful, and ad-free search capabilities. In short, we’ve tried to make searching on Fluther a lot easier and more useful. Here are the main features:

1. Our own, in-house, Fluther-powered search engine
2. A search field on every page that populates as you type
3. A redesigned search page that shows matching users, topics, questions, and answers.
4. Search using @user to specify a user (see Tips and Tricks below).
   

The Auto-Complete List

The Google custom search box has been transformed into a plain text box, but with a twist. As you type, a list will appear underneath with a few of the most relevant results. You can use your arrow keys to select a result in the list, or you can click on any item to jump to it directly.

Search Page

A Fluther search page has replaced the Google search page, and combines matching users, topics, questions, and answers on the same page. Clicking the “see all” links will take you to paginated results for each group. You can add users to your Fluther, view topics, and jump to questions and answers right from within the search pages.

Tips and Tricks

In addition to good, old-fashioned search terms, we’ve also added the capability to search by user as well.  Simply preface a username with @ to search for questions and answers by that user.  For example, if I searched @ben pepper, Fluther search would show all the questions and answers by “ben” that contain the word “pepper.”

You can also group search terms using quotes, so “ben pepper” will search for the words “ben” and “pepper” together.

The Future of Search

Replacing the original Google search capabilities is just the tip of the iceberg. When you ask a question, we plan to show a list of similar questions in the hopes that you’ll find what you’re looking for faster. Over time we’ll be using search to make the content you see more relevant throughout the site.

All in all, we hope Fluther’s new search capabilities tickle your fancy. Whether that tickle is from the good feeling you get from seeing new technology or a gentle electric zap from your favorite sea creature, we hope you’ll enjoy searching the collective.

–The Fluther Team

P. S. Fluther would like to shake the many hands at Apache for their fine work in developing their search engine Solr (an extension of the Lucene project), which powers our search capabilities. Our hats are off to you.

** UPDATE: The new search now also works for mobile devices like the iPhone.  Visit www.fluther.com on your iPhone or iPod Touch or visit http://i.fluther.com on your desktop computer to see the mobile version of the site.

1. Redesigned profiles
2. Topics
3. Privacy

Let’s break each one down in a bit more detail.

Redesigned profiles

Profile pages are much more attractive. Instead of showing every possible thing about you on one page, there’s an overview that highlights the greatest things about you. The bio section has been reborn as “your story”. The greatest questions you’ve asked and the greatest answers you’ve written are automatically shown (skip down to the privacy section for more on managing these). Topics are now styled in the new way instead of just being a text link.

Topics

Mousing over a topic anywhere on Fluther will now show a “hovercard”: a snippet that lets you know how many questions there are on that topic, how many people have it publicly on their profile and gives you the option to add it to (or remove it from) your profile. Adding and removing topics is quick and easy and won’t refresh the page. We’ve added descriptions to the topics, so if you see an acronym that you don’t understand (say, DSLR), you can hover over the topic to get more information. If you see a topic that could use a description, please flag it to let us know.

Privacy

Protecting your privacy is something very important to Fluther. You should be in control of your content. We’ve made two changes that give you control over topics, questions and answers on your profile.

You can add topics discreetly (discretely too if you wish). If you are into seahorse porn or have a sensitive disease and want to see those questions but don’t want to tell the world, just add it your profile, go to that topic page and uncheck the “Show this topic on my profile” box.

You can also control which questions and answers are shown on your profile on a one-by-one basis. If you see a question or answer anywhere on your profile, you can click “Hide on Profile”. If you want to undo that just click “Show on Profile” (if you hide a question or answer from the overview you’ll have to go find it on the questions/answers tab).

Other changes

Since the beginning of time (or at least the beginning of Fluther) comments have been referred to as messages or PMs. We’re changing the name of comments to messages across the site to make it clearer for everyone.

“Your Fluther” is being renamed to “people you are following”. “Your Fluther” confused many people, so now instead of “adding someone to your fluther,” you can just  “follow” that person. This should avoid a lot of confusion.

We will be merging the expertise, hobbies & interest and places fields into a single topics field. If you want to see your old data for those fields, go to My Account and click the “View retired profile fields” link. Topics are being cleaned up to focus on actual fields of knowledge so if you wrote a mini-bio in those sections you may want to go to that page and copy and paste some of that text into your story.

Finally–in other news–we just crossed a big milestone in traffic: more than a million people visit Fluther every month. We’re honored and humbled to have helped so many of you.

You’ve probably already noticed the appearance of the General and Social sections on Fluther; if you haven’t, go take a look!

Why sections?

As Fluther continues to grow, it’s become harder to filter through the questions to find the ones that will interest you.

While some people are looking for a direct answer to a question, others are more interested in getting opinions and learning about people.

How does it work?

The guidelines for how people respond to questions are different between the two sections, so you’ll get more direct answers in the General Section, and more personal answers in the Social Section.

As the (brand new!) Fluther Help describes it:

General: Strict guidelines. The focus is to help people get the answers they need.

Social: Relaxed guidelines. People are encouraged to express their opinions and flex their sense of humor. Social works best when you’re wanting to learn about people.

Questions will only appear in one section; those posted in the Social Section will not appear in the General Section, and vice-versa.

Where does my question belong?

Ultimately, it’s up to you! The whole point of these changes are to allow askers to choose what type of responses best answer their question.

These questions would probably do really well in the General Section:

• How do you get all the air bubbles out of a concrete pillar?
• Does anyone know how you make a tamarind sauce?
• Besides the inability to produce sperm, is there anything women cannot do, let
  alone do as well if not better than men?
• Can anyone point me in the direction of a cake decorating supply site?

These questions would probably do really well in the Social Section:

• What’s happening to your memory? Is there something you forget all the time?
• When and why do you treat your body the worst, foodwise?
• If you were to be arrested for anything, what would it be?

Sometimes questions really aren’t suited for the General Section, because the majority of the answers they invite would be moderated there. If this is the case, a moderator will contact you to ask you to move your question.

That’s it!

Be sure to read the Fluther Help pages for the General Section and the Social Section. Don’t forget that our trusty mod team are here to help.

Remember that you can ask a question in the Meta Section if you’re interested in learning more about these changes. We’ll be on hand to answer any questions there.

Image courtesy of gbaku.

Ever wanted to know when your favorite jellies adds you to their fluther? That’s what we thought.

We just added a new notification setting that lets you receive an email or IM when this happens–making it easier to keep track of your crew.

Hope you find it useful.

OK, so you guys have requested numerous features over the last three years (especially that johnpowell character). Occasionally we’ve listened. This is one of those times.

We’ve threaded comments so you can see the whole conversation you’ve been having with someone—it’s been long overdue. To get started, click “Comments for you”. On that page click “reply” to see the threaded view.

Also we made the delete process faster. If you accidentally delete a comment you can now undo it!

Tell us what you think!

Image by wheatfields

We’ve added a new, experimental category to clean up the main page — meta. Now, you can ask questions about what’s going on in the site without disrupting the main flow.

Just like the chatroom, the meta tab gives you an option to talk about Fluther itself. Unlike the Discussion and Question categories, though, questions in the Meta category will not be shown on the main “All” view.

Let us know what you think!

Image by slava (via Tim)

Well, it’s been a long time coming. We finally decided enough was enough, dug in, and wrote up a chatroom last week. It’s been in testing for just a little bit, so there’s quite a good possibility something may go wrong, so just PM us and yell.

• Tidepool — Support Chat
• Watering Hole — Social Chat

You can log in with your existing Fluther account, there’s increased security, and it’s a great place to be social. Let us know what you think!

Photo by mikebaird on Flickr.

Finding it hard to navigate the massive wave of avatars on profile pages?

Good news! With the increased limits on your fluther, we decided it was time to speed things up by reducing the things shown on profile pages. You’ll now see a random set of up to 15 users.

Also there’s new following and follower pages which let you browse users. On these pages you can easily see if you’re following a user, and if you’re not a single click will let you follow anyone (without refreshing the page).

This makes it easier to browse someone’s fluther to look for and follow interesting users. Happy Fluthering!

(For an example, look at who is following Ben.)

Photo by kekremsi.

A few of you may have wondered what the limit on the size of your fluther was when you bumped into a limit at an unusual number. And you’d probably scratch your head when we said the limit was 150 and yet you were still at 138. It turns out, it was a bug. As of now that’s fixed, so you can reach the full 150 jellies in your fluther. Except…along with this bug fix we’re officially raising the limit to 200. That is all, now go make more friends!

PM me, Ben, or Tim if you’d like to be included in the beta group.

Special thanks to johnpowell for the kick in the pants.