Using the Search Facility

When the site was launched, I mentioned that there were still a couple of glitches which had to be ironed out. Many thanks to Alan Tomkins of Alpha Tango, and his tecchy man Adrian for resolving them. There are two separate search facilities. While they are straightforward enough, if you haven’t encountered the wonderful world of computer searches, a brief explanation might be useful.

Tom Eats!

Each restaurant is allocated a location, a style of cooking, and a score. You can search using a combination of these. So if you want to look for restaurants in Edinburgh, select Edinburgh from the drop down menu under the heading Locations. If you are looking for a particular style of place in Edinburgh, choose from the drop down menu under the heading Restaurant Type. Bear in mind it is sometimes quite difficult to define a cooking style. Your defiinition may differ from mine. The Score button is set at zero. If you are interested in anything above a certain level (17 and above is pretty good, 20 and above is very good), move the slider to your minimum requirement. You will then see only places which have attained that score or higher.

Tom Cooks!/On The Side

At the top right on each of these pages you will see a search button. This is what is known as a free text search, and will find the combination of letters which you key in (not just the word)  in the site. Its primary purpose is to enable you to find a recipe if you have a particular ingredient and are seeking inspiration. It will do that, but a couple of cautionary notes.

• Unless you specify where you want to search, it will find the word anywhere. If, therefore, you search for lamb it will point you to lamb recipes, but also to any review in which lamb is mentioned. To search only in recipes, select Tom Cooks! from the drop down menu. That is fairly simple, but beware an insurmountable anomaly relating to the combination of letters which I refer to above.
• For example, searching for lamb will also bring up the recipes for Roasted Pineapple and Crab Ravioli. I scratched my head about this, then realised that both of these contain the word flambé. It’s not feasible to tag every ingredient in every recipe, so we just have to live with it. It’s still a major improvement on the last site.

If you find any more glitches, or have any problems, let me know.