Beach Search Engine Demo

I've written recently about building a perfect beach search engine. Here is a brief example of using the site.

Let's imagine you want to find a beach that offers snorkeling, but you want to find one that is shallow because you have small children with you. A query for 'snorkeling AND shallow' brings up the following results:

(currently the data on the site is limited to Kauai and Maui).

From these, I might decide that I'm more interested in Kauai than Anini (it does appear to have more of the beaches that I'm looking for after all).

Clicking on Kauai, then selecting Anini beach leads me to the following:

Here I can see that there is plenty of content describing the beach. Some of the content contains highlighted terms that lead me to confirm that it is indeed described as a beach that offers snorkeling and that it is shallow. Content from both Fodor's and FourSquare supports this:

A great family park, Anini is unique in that it features one of the longest and widest fringing reefs in all Hawaii, creating ashallow lagoon that is good for snorkeling and following the occasional turtle.... [Fodors]

A nice, shallow place for snorkeling, but can get tiring to swim around if the current is too strong.... [FourSquare]

There are many issues with the site that I'm slowly addressing, but the basic task of finding beaches seems to be up and running. If you are interested, please take a look and let me know what you think - the site is available here.

Comments

[Viliam Kanis]

Starts to look good but still needs a lot of work. E.g. some lemmatisation. When I search for snorkeling it finds Makua/Kauai but when I search for snorkel it doesn´t find it which is quite strange as snorkel is a substring of snorkeling.

[Matthew Hurst]

Viliam - Thanks for the comments. I'm deliberately putting this out there with plenty of issues. In the online software world, one can wait for a product to be perfect and never release it, or get feedback early and release often. That is what I hope to do with this system. Regarding lemmatisation, I now have this working on my dev system and will push it out this week. Hopefully you can take another look then. Some interesting issues arise, such as while it is ok to stem snorkeling to snorkel, it is less clear if you want to return hits on 'surf' when searching for 'surfing'.