Will the new improved search function on Sharetribe.com come to the open source version?

[membersince]

Today, the new search function on closed source Sharetribe was released. Will this be available for the open sourced sharetribe as well ?

From the announcement:

Help your users find products or services near them.

Introducing location search and a much-improved keyword search
Great news: Sharetribe's new search engine is now available for your marketplace! Whether your users want to search by keyword or by a location, the powerful new search will help all users.

Location search

The new location search will automatically suggest locations as users start typing, suggesting countries, cities, neighborhoods, zip codes or even street names. If you are using a map, it automatically moves and zooms to the right location based on your search query. The search is also a lot smarter: search results are no longer limited to the exact street or city address—results that are close by will also be shown. A big win for usability and discovery! When you use a list or grid view with location search, it will display all the listings from your marketplace and sort them based on the distance to the searched location.

Improved keyword search

Sharetribe's keyword search has been completely revamped. In addition to being able to search based on provider name, search results are now sorted by relevancy. Finding exactly what you are looking for on your marketplace is now easier than ever!

Try them out!

Choose whether you want to use a keyword search or a location search as your default search method from your admin panel under Settings and Search preferences. You can also choose whether to show distances in miles or kilometers.

[kpuputti]

Yes, definitely! The open source version will get all the tools and code to use the same search engine.

We still need to do some final polishing like add documentation and setup instructions before we feel confident that the released repositories will be useful for the open source version of Sharetribe. So stay tuned, this should happen during the upcoming weeks.

A small comment on your wording on "closed source Sharetribe". We are using 100% the same code as the open source version, we just provide a hosted version where many people can create their own marketplace and receive automatic updates from the open source code. We are very committed in open sourcing everything by default if it makes sense and is useful for the community.

Thank you for your interest in the new search engine, we will announce it here in the forums when it is released!

[membersince]

Do you have an ETA on this? Some of the reason why I use the wording closed source is because my experience with open source projects, is that new updates go first to the community, get tested there, and then to the "for profit" version.

I think what you guys are doing is excellent and please keep up the good work

[ovan]

We don't yet have a timeline for this other than "later this year". The new search is part of a slighlty bigger initiative to pull much of the core backend functionality away from the current monolithic Rails application. At the same time we'll be introducing an API between the user interface (Rails app + JS frontend) and the service backend(s). What we have now for search is not yet stable enough or documented well enough to be usable outside our own team. I sincerely believe that encouraging anyone to use it at this point would create more trouble than value. That said, we definitely don't want to introduce too much features that are only supported by our hosted solution as a result of this transition time.

We will open access to this code when things mature a bit more. From that point on we plan to have the development work happen in the public repository the same way as with the current Rails application repository. We can update this topic when we know more but right now I don't want to make any promises that would tie our hands too much and/or end up being impossible to keep.

[Michael]

Hey there! Any news on when location search is available in opensource?

[ovan]

No news yet. Are you asking just out of general interest or do you have a specific need in mind?

[Michael]

Hi! thanks for the response. I am working on a project where location search would be important, thats why I asked. best wishes

[Ryan_Vienneau]

Is there any update on this topic? I just had a developer implement the open source version for me and a bunch of customizations, and am just now discovering that the most critical feature, keyword + location search, is disabled on open source Sharetribe. Any ideas when to expect it? Any workarounds? If a user is not broadcasting their location and I'm using keyword search, how does Sharetribe know what to provide for location based search results?

[olivier]

Hi everyone,
same question to @ovan as @Ryan_Vienneau: any update on this topic? We are also working on a new sharetribe community we want to open in few days and this feature is critical for us too.
Thanks in advance for your update.

[Baptiste_deTestagogo]

Hi Ovan,

Is there any update on this topic? This part is critical to our plateform :s

Cheers,
Baptiste

[matthewvryan]

We have implemented location search for our open source version. It works pretty much the same way as hosted. Search by location and the search results page lists the closest listings first within a 100km radius.

[tipa]

Can you share your experience?
thanks

[matthewvryan]

We used the Geocoder Gem to get Lat/Long for the address typed into the search box and then passed this to Sphinxsearch. A radius is used to limit the search results. This implementation has some limitations for Country and State based search, so we are working through some options to solve this.

[Kevin]

Is anybody have a good solution to solve this issue. thank you for your help.

[matthewvryan]

We solved this now and pretty happy that location search is working pretty well.