Unraveled

Today will be the second to last installment of my tips walking you through the top navigation tabs on the site. This week I’ll cover the quick search, and next time I will do a final link-up and summary. If you can’t wait and want to check out the previous posts right away, here are some links: patterns tab, yarns tab, people tab, forums tab, groups tab, and shop tab.

Let’s get started checking out the quick search!

The quick search can be found at the right-most end of the top navigation. It’s not truly a tab – clicking the magnifying glass will open an overlay on top of whatever page you’re currently browsing. Next, let’s walk through the overlay.

There are 3 sections to the quick search pop-up.

quick search

Entering a search term here is a great site-wide search. You can use it to look for people, patterns, projects, yarns – anything you might find on Ravelry! I’ll dig deeper into that below.

advanced search

This section has direct links to all of the sections of advanced search. I can click on any of them and be taken to a search for those items, with multiple options for sorting and filtering. It is the fastest way to get to advanced search – just 2 clicks! – and I use it multiple times a day to look things up.

my saved searches

When you create an advanced search you really like, you can save it for later review. I wrote a blog post about saving searches and subscribing to them last year; I recommend it if you want to learn more about them.

Now, let’s check out what it looks like when you use the quick search.

As you can see, the quick search looks all over the site for matches for your term (I had to cut off the prolific-ness of Ysolda to fit it in this post!). Click on any item in that list to go check it out in detail. We sort the results by type so you can quickly zero in on the result you’re after. You can enter a result type after your search term if you want to limit your search – like “Hitchhiker pattern” will avoid results that won’t be linked to a pattern such as people.

And that’s it. The quick search tab is little, but it’s a great way to quickly navigate around the site; I hope you find it useful, too! Next time I’m back I’ll provide a post with links to all the site tab tips and one more place you can look for helpful info.