We have finished a major overhaul of the search engine and would like to know about it. Mainly the changes have been made to the front end where you do your selecting of attributes.
1. The search mode now starts out with a scrolling text view of all the birds in the database.
You can sort the names by First, Last
You can sort the names by Last, First. This is nice as you can sort the birds into families.
You can sort the names taxonomically. Here you can see the partridge and chukar come right after the falcons.
You can perform a "dynamic" bird search. As you enter letters, the system whittles down the possibilities so that the correct bird name will scroll to the top. Here we typed the letters "cur" and the system narrowed the list to just birds with the with "cur" in them.
You can switch to icon view if you prefer that. These can also be sorted three ways.
2. The bird names have all been reduced to the nominate name, there is no longer suffixes like “breeding male”, “female”, etc.
If there are variations to the bird they appear under a new tab called Variations. For example here is the Anna’s Hummingbird male, female and juvenile:
If we have not created variation images the tab does not appear.
We are adding variations for all the birds now. d. There are 882 “species” in the database but there are actually over 1000 images.
3. The Compare link allows you to view from 2 to 5 birds in a side by side grid – there is one small bug in it we are still fixing.
