Just uploaded our webinar recording! You can click through this table of contents for specific moments of interest or just watch the full video below. Cheers!
hey @zelus_pudding if you still got space in the beta, I would be interested in participating. We are building a search for local businesses. Thanks. If not, when are you planning on launching?
@zelus_pudding Still curious about your search tool and have my eye on it.
Questionā¦ Currently I do one main straightforward search, pulling in the relevant data (not all of it). Letās call that step āAā. It sits in a repeating group. Then we allow users to click filters and it gets narrowed down further all on client side (step āBā). Itās efficient and only the initial search causes the WU hit.
If we used your search to complete step A, are we then able to continue using the existing client side filters on the repeating group for step B?
We see your search setup often. Unfortunately, the answer is Yes but No. You can apply your existing client side filters to our result set because we do return a list of your things. But we only return a single page of results at a timeā¦ so client-side filters would filter on the 20 to 100 results returned per page (the actual number of results per page is up to you).
Returning less than 100 results per page is best practice - whether using our plugin or not - since that keeps the number of total database hits small. If your current search is already returning fewer than 100 hits that you then client-side filter on, then you technically could layer those filters on top of our search results. But I recommend authoring filters in Typesenseās (or Algoliaās) native filter syntax since thatās going to scale the best.
Plugin updates incoming! When we opened our restricted beta a month ago, we knew weād be making several improvements based on developer feedback. Today Iām sharing a few of those with the community along with whatās around the corner.
So whatās new? In the last month weāve:
Added support for advanced options giving developers even more ways of customizing search results. See docs here.
Made it simpler to write filters by enabling developers to use Bubbleās Dynamic yes / no expressions without having to Formatted as text the value to true or false. See docs here.
Added ability to auto sync user emails (which wasnāt available at launch because it required a custom sync mechanism).
Minor bug fixes, added filters documentation, and made quality of life improvements.
Upgrades coming in 1 to 2 weeks.
Upgrading the way we fetch and use app data type informationā¦ which will likely usher in minor speed improvements on our Create and Update search record actions. Thank you @erick2 for your suggestion.
natively save and show prior sync configurations without having to save those to your own app.
add a search bar to quickly search for datatypes - especially nice for apps with many datatypes.
When writing Filters, auto-magically handle dates from Bubbleās native Dynamic Expressions so developers donāt have to remember to convert them to Unix Timestamps.
After publishing these new features, weāll start the process of formally launching Scious Search on the plugin marketplace (which takes 3 to 14 days). In the meantime, since we are able to onboard five more early adopters, those interested can reach out to me to get started. Happy searching!
Literally one of the best plugins ever. Currently using a combination of Scious + ListShifter by @keith and the way they process data is absolutely insane.
It literally takes less than 1 second to filter through and return 5000+ records on the social app Iāve been developing.
ListShifter handles our unique pagination structure but more importantly, any time anybody does literally anything, LiftShifter will let me know. This allows me to efficiently add loaders, states, and all types of conditional workflows based on whether ListShifter is receiving new information or not.
Despite these being third party plugins, both Scious Search along with List Shifter are finishing their jobs faster than bubbles engine can keep up. From start to finish their processing data faster than my own eyes can keep up. I had to add a brief loader just to give myself the visual feedback that something just happened.
Iām using maybe 20% of the potential power of these plugins and I still feel like theyāre magic. For years, it felt like I kept hitting a wall no matter how many problems I solved or how crafty I got.
Something as āsimpleā as checking to make sure a username is available, literally isnāt possible on native bubble. Not if youāre trying to scale an app to tens of thousands of users if not much much much more.
The ādo a search forā workflow is demon spawn. Make-Static isnāt going to save you from the hell-incarnate that is bubble receiving new data, and immediately downloading it to your device.
Iāve put an ungodly amount of time and effort into this app, and yet, I would literally be dead in the water if not for @keith and @zelus_pudding
No hyperbole these plugins are the greatest thing since sliced bread.
I really appreciate your feedback Drixxon! Been such a pleasure developing this and seeing it get used in applications like yours
To share a more general update - while still technically in Beta, Scious Search is being used in production by roughly a dozen users. I havenāt exited it from the Beta designation only because Iāve been focusing on releasing Bask, a VS Code extension that will help me (and others) develop high quality plugins.
While I have dedicated time to create Bask, I want to emphasize this has been in service of formally launching Scious Search - so I can work on it without the typical frustration of plugin development. I will continue to address issues that arise during the beta, as I have been, and look forward to releasing Scious Search to the marketplace as soon as possible. Thank you everyone!!
Another Bubble user just asked me for details on Scious Search so, given your interest, Iām going to share my response to him. Just let me know if I didnāt cover something you wanted to know.
What is the integration experience?
I would recommend you see our docs for a feel on this. Notably, youāll want to review our getting started and Search element / filtering section. Just like the first time you worked with Bubbleās native search, there is going to be a learning curve to using Scious Search. That said, all of our users have been able to learn it mostly on their own by reading our docs and referring to our demo editor. We have lots of example integrations.
What sort of support do you provide?
Please see here for details. Iāll emphasize that our optional $100 per month Service Level Agreement comes with error resolution guarantees so if you ever experience an issue, weāll have it fixed or provide a workaround within 4 hours (for the most severe of issues).
How stable is Scious Search?
While still officially in Beta, Scious Search is already production ready and has been for at least half a year. We have over a dozen companies around the world using Scious Search, some for nearly a year and a half at this point. See this and this other review from some of my earliest adopters. Only reason weāre not officially out of Beta / on the marketplace is because Iāve been developing a VS Code Extension to streamline Bubble plugin development, which will help me add search recommendations to Scious Search.
Does it filter and sort?
Yes, we have sorting and very robust filtering capabilities. See here for details. The big thing to be aware of is that no search plugin today (including ours) is directly able search / filter on nested field constraints (i.e. filter all org records whoās list of admin usersfirstnameis John). But we have workarounds for that sort of thing.
How can I implement search record personalization?
Out of the box, Scious Search can sort search results by any custom relevance score youāve pre-calculated. That said, we donāt yet have an explicit personalization capability just yet (something like Algoliaās Recommend). Itās on our roadmap.
Iād just like to remind that our plugin comes with a 10 day free trial. After that, our API keys are charged $9/month or $85 annually. If that sounds compelling, please let me know and I can share next steps to get started. Thank you
I might be asking a very naive and dumb question, so please pardon me. I havenāt delved much into search, so not sure how it works, what are these types of searches called etcā¦ What I want to build is a search experience like this.
Search across multiple categories and show results from multiple categories
Each result should be aware of which category it was found in, so that result can be customised in terms of its display and click action.
Search should be case insensitive
Search with keywords being in different order than what is in texts
Some words can be written as two words by user while it may be single word in DB or other way round. Would be good to have those searched too. E.g. DB may have word āmicrowaveā, while person may write āmicro waveā
Ranking by level of matching (e.g. all keywords matching vs partial matching etc.)
Each search result should show the text part that matched and matched thing should be highlighted
Other things that I look for:
Search synonyms if possible (I am okay to add synonyms myself in a field)
Search with small spelling mistakes if possible
Do you know what is this search construct called? It is quite common across apps. Just that I do not know how to tell anyone what I am looking for.
Is this possible with your plugin? Do I even need your plugin for this? My list of items is not very high. It might be few hundreds at max at the moment. But even if it grows, it will be like thousand or so. Not like millions that your search plugin is capable of.
Hey Mukesh, thank you for your questions. What youāre looking for is simply āa good search engineā. My plugin coupled with either Algolia or Typesense addressed most or all of those problems. The aspects it may struggle with the most are the ability to search with keywords being in different order than what is in texts but even that is addressed to a degree. They also return hits regardless of spelling mistakes (up to an amount) but synonym search is something our solution cannot do out of the box - you would have to add synonyms to a new field as you suggested.
Another aspect to consider is whether your ideal plugin in question can respect Privacy Rules youāve added to your datatypes. Our plugin does whereas most alternative search plugins do not.
That said, as long as your record count is low, you can likely get away with using the Quick Find plugin. However, once your record count begins to get closer to 1000, youāll want to switch over to something like Scious Search since most existing solutions that donāt employ a dedicated search engine like Typesense or Algolia will begin to really slow down your page (at page load).
Thanks @zelus_pudding for the detailed reply. Iāll check out Quick Find plugin and also read up Scious search.
My search also includes searching within option sets as one of the data sources is option set within same search box. Does that become a factor in deciding the plugin?
Short update! Now that Bask (which I built to continue developing Scious Search) is entering general availability, Iāll be - at long last - formally launch Scious Search to the marketplace. That means weāre exiting Beta!
I expect Iāll be able to do this in the next two weeks so if anyone wants to try it in the meantime, feel free to DM me and Iāll help you get setup Pumped!
I tried Quick Find Plugin, but have been running into issues.
This post and this post mention the issues I am having. And then there are other issues related to nested data handling or ability to process search results.
Is your plugin going to be available anytime soon? What would be the pricing of it?
And I must say 
Glad to see your interest.
Pumped!