Search-a-licious wants to make searching a delicious experience
Open Food Facts is, to our knowledge, the most important Food Open Database. With close to 3 Million products it might not be easy to find relevant information!
The project began with quite good search capabilities, offering a lot of aggregations to explore the database, graphics and advanced search capabilities (did you ever explore it?). But it’s quite austere and lacks interactivity. Also it has a number of limitations on full text search and combining possibilities.
But the situation is going to improve! Thanks to NGI, Next Generation Internet program, funded by the European Commission, we are building a new search integration. This won’t benefit the Open Food Facts project alone as it aims to be a turnkey search solution easy to integrate to other projects dealing with large collections of items.
This search will provide:
- good full text capabilities,
- precisely handle multiple languages,
- offer refinement through faceted search and suggestions,
- enhance the graph capabilities
- and do it all quickly!
- It will come with an easy to use and powerful API.
- It will also pave the way for more features like smart understanding of queries, auto-completion, etc.
a mockup of a potential new search
Having a search on par with the best search engines enables open data to reach a larger public and get more impact.
It helps people find products that correspond to their diet or specific needs, it enables finding better alternatives. It allows researchers, journalists or activists to investigate quickly and discover hidden facts.
We also see this project as an opportunity for other developers to quickly set up new platforms that leverage available datasets with similar characteristics.
Thanks to Simon, we already have a basis for the project which we are going to completely transform to meet the new goals. If you are a developper, a UI or UX designer, you are welcome to participate in this adventure. Even as a user, your use cases are welcome, don’t hesitate to communicate them.
You can join the project and look at the search-a-licious directory.
We will also have a weekly meeting (see community calendar)
