Search within your Circuits!
We've been busy this last week working on our most requested features, the work has progressed well so today we're releasing a significant update.
You will now notice a little search button in the top right of our circuit viewer:
This new feature lets you search within your circuits, allowing you to quickly find the components being discussed, or to track down that resistor with a specific value. Its also a live search, so as you type you can see the symbols in your circuit being highlighted, hit return and it will zoom the view to show all the results. You can then move between results with the arrow buttons.
As if that wasn't enough for one update, we've also added a bunch of new features to the site.
Tags were a hugely requested feature over the last week, so we've added them to the edit page:
These tags have an autocomplete that is sorted by most popular, so please try and use existing tags wherever possible so we get the maximum value out of them. While we haven't yet enabled tag search we have got clickable lists of tags in our Public Circuits page, and they are available through the view page for each circuit.
Search is of course the focus of this update, but its a major undertaking, and something that is very difficult to do better than Google. So instead of keeping you all waiting, we've decided to add Google Custom Search to the site. From the Public Circuits page you can now search the site easily.
We would love to improve the design and functionality in this custom search engine, but sadly many of the improved features like thumbnails within search results are restricted to Google Site Search users only which is a paid for system that we can't yet afford. This is also why the search page has Google Ads shown within it. We will of course look at improving this search in the future, perhaps implementing our own more specific search system, or (when we can afford it) purchasing a Google Site Search account and heavily customizing it.
Finally, we've made some minor improvements to the circuit view, and our library and circuit parsers. This should enable a few more circuits that were having problems with the site. So if you were having issues before, please retry and let us know how you get on.
Next up we're going to be working on improving the viewer performance, and trying to improve the upload/edit process since we've noticed a lot of people having problems getting their circuits uploaded. If you have any suggestions about how you would like the upload/edit process to work please let us know!