Feature request: VH cache based search functionality

[YorVeX]

For us in countries where Amazon doesn't offer its own search functionality, it would be great if VH could cache all products it has seen locally (if it doesn't already do) and offer its own search based on this data.

There would be a search field where I can enter terms I want to search for and it would find them in the cached data. I would get a result list showing the product title and the category it was seen in, and the date when it was last seen. The latter is also used to eventually clear up old data, maybe make it a config option so I can choose how long I want to keep this data, because if it is too outdated it's useless to know that it once has been there.

It's probably a question of storage size limits, so I am not sure how feasible it would be to store also the longer description texts of each products, but at least being able to search the product titles and have the category information would already go a long way.

[FMaz008]

This is not something I intend on doing at the moment. One major reason is that you would search items for which 95% are no longer available.

Technically the search could be done by the API as the items are stored serverside for 90 days. No need to store them locally. But the feature would be so disfunctional it would be frustrating to use.

Also VH does not handle categories at all.

As far as the "search" icons goes for the notifications, that issue should be solved with the version 2.9 being in the process of being released.

[YorVeX]

From user perspective my 2 most important use cases are:

1. "Is it worth waiting for a toaster to become available or is that something currently not likely to appear in Vine at all?"
2. "Wait, haven't I seen a Thunderbolt cable just yesterday or the day before? Hm, but in which category was that? And how long ago, how many pages would I have to go through?"

With 1) being a case that even 2 month old product info could be useful for, and whether the last toaster I find is from 2 months ago, or 1 month, or a week also tells me something. And it also tells me in which category they were, so that I know which I would have to regularly check. I currently solved this by asking on Discord and indeed someone could tell me one was available a day ago, so now I know it's worth waiting a bit more.

Amazon thinking someone would search 933 pages manually is really insane. And using the mere 2 levels of categories we can use to narrow it down (if I have an idea what category to search in, to begin with) doesn't help either, for the bigger ones that's still 50+ pages to manually search through.

I have a lot of situations where I want something and I think it's likely it's in Vine (or I even know because I remember recently seeing it somewhere), but I don't even bother starting to search manually, knowing it's hopeless unless I want to spend half the day on it. Such a feature could turn a fully hopeless situation in one where I have a chance or at least a starting point. If I scroll through the product list, the majority of products is days, weeks or even months old, and I am not only talking about hunting the super attractive products this way, they're long gone anyway, it's more about the boring average product you didn't know you'd need yesterday, but today it broke and you remember you saw potential replacements the other day.

It's happening all the time, and whenever I actually take the time to search manually I often find it eventually, at least for me those 95% are far from accurate.

I still get your point from dev perspective, it's not really attractive to add a feature that might only be useful in a lower percentage of cases, to the benefit of a smaller percentage of the user base, but still needs 100% of dev effort - you need to prioritize so that's understandable. I still felt like also giving my user perspective, because I'd assume when you have a search feature it's hard to imagine how extremely frustrating it can be without, and what wonders even a small improvement can do.

[FMaz008]

Vine Helper does not have any concept of categories, at all. It only deal with ASIN. It does not store any categories information at any point.

[Wladefant]

That is a feature that could work if Item not in Enrollment works how it should work and maybe there should be some combination of position checking. So if the item is not in the location it was (between this and this item for example), that it is assumed that there is not item anymore.

[FMaz008]

I've done features for countries without search before (like search open modal window, which was a few days if work.

I'm not opposed to it. But always thought exploring the database would be a premium thing because
A. It's resource intensive
B. It's optional (more so for countries with search)
C. It's a lot of work
D. Originally I envisionned this as a database read only browser (excluding users data), as a separate website not par of VH.

Now I'm thinking a search within vine helper could be a better experience. But this would still be a fairly big endeavour. It's basically a less fancy notification monitor, but fetching from a search. And it might have performance implication on the database as searching the massive table for titles will require some optimizations.

It was enough if a concern for the fetch 100 to get it's own separate memory table.

I do have more pressing matters at the moment, but will look into it. Fair warning: if the performance show it's resource intensive, which I think it will be, this would very likely be a premium feature or a hybrid (ie: first page free, subsequent pages premium)

[Wladefant]

Agree, for every country except the united states this is a life changing feature, especially when implemnting with a smart search