June 18, 2008

Bring Back "old–style" Email Search!

I tried to find a mates warwick email address today.

Instead of getting the simple little email search page, I get the entire Warwick website search page with the ‘People’ tab selected. OK then, let’s see if it works…

I’m not sure if his “real name” is Nick or Nicholas (or any other spelling), so I search for “n surname”.

I then see that it’s not just searching for “People”, but also “Web”, “Blogs” and “Exam Papers”. Why on earth would I want to search for my mates email address in exam papers!?

Because the letter ‘n’ generated so many hits in exam papers, my browser cannot cope with the amount of data and promptly crashes.

I try again, using the “Refine Search” option. But can I find a link to email address or similar? No. Nothing remotely related to that.

Why have they changed something simple and useful to something complicated and useless?

IF IT AIN’T BROKE, DON’T FIX IT!


- 3 comments by 2 or more people Not publicly viewable

  1. Mathew Mannion

    Hi Matthew,

    As the developer of the facility, I’m quite interested to see that you’ve got problems with it. I’ve certainly not heard of anybody else having some of the problems you’ve been experiencing. In particular, it seems like a bug that your browser would even try to load the data for exam papers (though I can see that that is the case and is something that we’ll try and fix for the next release).

    I’m not sure I understand your statement that there isn’t a link to an email address – all search results show email addresses. It’s possible that the person you were searching for was a student and you weren’t logged in. We deliberately don’t provide student email addresses to anonymous users (something that the old system didn’t abide by) and we also provide phone numbers where we can find them (again, something the old system didn’t do).

    Could you please email me the term that you searched for and who you expected to find? M.Mannion@warwick.ac.uk and I’ll try and help you out

    18 Jun 2008, 15:42

  2. Mathew Mannion

    We’ve rolled out a fix and it shouldn’t return excessive data to your browser if you search for “n” (or something similar) now. You may need to do a CTRL-F5 on a search page that doesn’t crash your browser to get the latest version of the Javascript file that fetches the data. Apologies for the inconvenience.

    18 Jun 2008, 16:21

  3. I was about to say, I didn’t have any problems and really like the new search. :) It’s just you Matt!

    30 Jun 2008, 00:56


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