What is Universal Search?
On every page of AppFolio Property Manager, you’ll find a small search box in the upper right of the screen – this is Universal Search. This box is a small search engine that you can use to quickly navigate around the application. You can use it just like a normal web search engine: enter a bit of information and it instantly brings back links that match your search terms.
For example, if you enter “555″ into the search box, it might show you links to a tenant whose phone number happened to be “555-1234″, or a property with address “555 Main st.”, or a work order with reference number “5554″. The search system even knows about the relationships in your data. So, for example, you can search for a property by entering the name of its owner, or vice-versa.
Why It’s Great
Being able to access information quickly is important to AppFolio users. On average, it takes only four seconds for our users to find what they are looking for using universal search. As every property manager knows, less time spent searching for the right data translates into money saved. And since AppFolio customers use search thousands of times a day, that saved money can add up!
How It Works
Search is just a small box on the AppFolio page, but it’s a large part of our infrastructure and is driven by sophisticated technology. Each time you type a letter into a search box, your web browser talks to AppFolio’s servers and asks it to search through your data for items that match those characters. We work hard to make sure our servers respond quickly enough to give search its interactive feel.
To do this, we use indexes provided by our search engine. An index works exactly like it sounds: just as a person searching for information in a book would never look at each page, our servers don’t look through all your data each time you search. Whenever you add data to AppFolio, it updates a big index that keeps track of all references to various terms. As you enter search terms our servers locate the corresponding entry in that big index and instantly find all occurrences of the term.
Where It’s Heading
We’re always looking for ways to improve AppFolio, and search is no exception. Our engineers are researching new ways to predict what data you’re looking for and present it quickly. If we’re successful, you’ll be able to type fewer characters to find what you’re looking for. Saving a few seconds may not sound like much, but for a feature that AppFolio customers use thousands of times a day, we hope it will add up to significant time savings and result in a product that is faster and easier to use.
About Andrew:
Andrew Mutz is a Senior Software Engineer at AppFolio. He is currently working on ways to improve both the result relevancy and the performance of AppFolio’s search infrastructure. In the past he has worked on a variety of projects at AppFolio, most recently online tenant payments. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Santa Barbara.
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