Could the web search be improved? Currently number of “valid” searches on the web do not come up with the right bottling while things work right on Android.
For example, if I look for Diplomatico 2008 (RX 17287) using the terms “diplomatico 2008” or “diplomatico 43” on the web, the bottling will not come up, but if I use the same terms on Android, the bottling will come up.
I think that’s because the vintage/year is not included in the search index. RXid and Name and there must be others, since “diplomatico venezuela” strangely gets 2 results where you don’t see “venezuela” anywhere in the card. But why only 2 rums when adding the country I have no clue.
Edit: ABV seems to be included in some cases but not in others. “diplomatico 40” finds 4 rums, 2 of them have the 40 in their RX-id, the other two have 40% abv. Obviously there are much more Diplomaticos with that ABV, why only those 2 turn up is a mystery. Looks to me the search index is built inconsistently.
Thank you for your feedback. I have now optimized the search mechanism on the website. It should now be easier to find the rums you want. Feel free to try it out. I look forward to any feedback.
One slight improvement request still. If the strings could be normalized to latin characters, it would make the searching easier for people who are not used to those characters nor have them on their keyboards. Example:
RX #19257: Instead of having to search using ’ Zéro Nine’ it would be nice if you could be able to find it using ‘Zero Nine’.
In addition anything like L’Absolu or L’Esprit has to have the leading “L” included in order to be found. The Apostrophe can be ommited, though. I’m not sure this is intuitive (for non French speakers): “Lesprit” (hit) vs. “Esprit” (miss).
One more request. I keep my list of rums on a Google spreadsheet which expands about 800 bottles at the moment. The main column identifying the rum I’ve entered as a link to rum-x. Unfortunately during the search updates, most of my links have broken. So, my request is to simply keep the links to the specific rums stable going forwards.
Thanks for bringing this up! The link structure should ideally remain stable, so I’m surprised to hear about the issue. Could you share an example of one of the “old” links from your sheet? I’ll dig into what might have changed and work on a solution to keep your links intact going forward.
where 12345 is any rumx ID (numbers only). You will then be redirected to the full url with the name.
@Oliver speaking of redirects, I’m very often redirected to the French (.fr) site since a few weeks. Not always, though. Is there any mechanism that decides between .fr and .com target that needs fine tuning?
What I just noticed is that when I click the link in the spreadsheet on my phone, it opens up the correct page on the rum-x app. But if I click it on my computer or just copy paste the link to chrome, I get a 404 page.
That link is 404 here, too (from FF Mobile on my phone).
however this works: https://www.rum-x.com/rums/15474
Fairly easy to fix as well in Excel, as you only need to remove the last / and everything that follows. Can be done via formula (or join the strings of the base url and the rx id as integer).
Availability of the results is then visually well represented by the green or grey cart buttons, and those looking to buy can use the “Available” filter to further refine results.
Limiting the initial search results to available releases might be confusing, especially if you’re not familiar with it and try to search “the largest rum database” but not finding anything because of this filter.
In the website update going live this afternoon, the default view will be set without any filters applied. I believe this will make the experience more intuitive, especially for first-time users exploring the database.
P.S.: I’ve made several improvements to the website over the past few days, particularly around search and filtering performance, which should now be noticeably faster. I’d love to hear your thoughts once you’ve had a chance to try it out!
Thanks again for sharing your feedback - it’s greatly appreciated.