Finding anywhere

February 17, 2009 – 12:39 pm

The keen-eyed among you will have noticed a few changes on rummble.com over the last week or so – we’ve been working on improving a few key features to make the site more useful (and nice to look at!). Here’s a quick rundown, in case you want to go and play with all the new toys we’ve added.

Find Rummbles anywhere!

We added search. Yes, finally. To many people, this seems like such a no-brainer – but for us it was a really hard decision to make. There are a million search engines out there – dedicated to places, experiences, venues – and we’re not trying to compete with these huge directories at all. One of the nicest things about Rummble is that you very often don’t need to search – you just tell Rummble where you are, and it gives you a seemingly hand-picked list of things you’ll like nearby. There doesn’t need to be a hundred results in the list, because the things that aren’t there are the things you’re not going to be interested in anyway.

Admittedly, this philosophy started on, and works best with, our mobile platforms. It’s different on the web – you’re much more likely to be looking for stuff somewhere other than the spot you’re sitting; if you’re planning a trip or a night out, or you’re hunting for spots to share with your mates in another town. For this sort of thing, ‘Find xxx near yyy‘ is indispensible.

So, we built it, and it’s working really well. The new search has two key parts:

1. What are you looking for?

The tag search includes some clever interpretation behind the scenes – so you can search for ‘restaurant’ without missing out on things tagged with ‘bistro’ or ‘bar and grill’. Tags are grouped together by theme, which matches what most people expect when they start searching.

2. Where are you looking?

The location search is where it gets really clever – it searches a variety of sources, from country and region names, through cities and towns, right down to databases of local businesses. Depending on what you enter, the search results are filtered intelligently – if you enter the name of a country, you’re unlikely to want local business results included in your results.

When your search could match more than one location, you’re given the choice to pick the one you want. If your search only matches one place, we center the map directly on that spot, and start showing you what’s nearby immediately.

Testing this was tricky – the search is so good that whenever I typed ’svshbsa’ to try to trigger the ‘we couldn’t find this place‘ response, I discovered tiny towns in Iceland and Mongolia!

Sexy new masthead and navigation:

We’ve replaced the old masthead with a streamlined new version. Much of the functionality remains the same – we know a lot of Rummble users really like the quick access to all the parts of the site – but the new design keeps visual clutter down, and stops those big yellow buttons screaming at you from the top of the page.

Bigger Rummble Explore view

The ‘Explore’ page now has a big Rummble map and the new ‘find’ box, and that’s it. Great for browsing around to discover new stuff.

What’s next?

As ever, we’ve got a whole lot of stuff in the works – the next big thing is the launch of our new mobile site. Those of you who frequent m.rummble.com are in for a real treat! More on that in a couple of days!

We’re all ears for your reactions to the new changes – either hit the comments form, or drop me an email at ben [dot] hull [at] rummble [dot] com.