The Importance of Searching

When someone does a task that takes fourteen steps and you find a way to do the same task in one step that is an exciting feature. That is the kind of feature that differentiates one product from all the rest. In Geebis we have a lot of great feature ideas but the breakout feature is searching.

The searching capabilities in Geebis are the difference between people using our software and people not using our software. A good search tool is like Rumpelstiltskin, it takes in straw and returns gold. The search capabilities have to be good, and they have to be forgiving. Geebis needs to have an integrated spell checker and grammar checker. It has to search on every non-id field in the database. The search should look for key words and sort the results accordingly. It should be fast, it should be indexed. Searching should be everywhere, from customers to invoices to terms. If searching is pervasive people will rely on it, and if we can get people to rely on the searching than they won't lose their stuff. How common is it to have the same customer in your database three times, or have the same product listed twice? If the searching is really good people will be able to find what they are looking for, even if they only know vaguely who or what it is. And not only does that mean they can get their work done, it means they aren't frustrated with the computer.

The live as you type searching (like in iTunes and Spotlight) is really great, you don't have to push enter or click search or anything, just type in your criteria and the results automatically fill in. It is very fast too. I certainly have not seen any other software in the "three letter acronym" (ERP, CRM, B2B, etc) market come anywhere close to this kind of polish. And that is what is going to make Geebis better than those other guys. We still have a lot of work to do, but I think that we are on the right track.