Improvements to Search

We’ve made a few improvements to Search in Brandkit 2.

Switchable AND/OR search strategy makes a comeback

You can now toggle between an AND or an OR search strategy. Just click the AND/OR link to toggle between the two modes of search.

You can toggle modes before your search or during your search (i.e. you already have search phrases or tags in the search box.

(Initially available in Admin - Portal shortly thereafter)

Type ahead suggestions are now configurable

You can now configure Searchbox type-ahead suggestions to show only Tags or All Meta fields.

> “We had some feedback from customers that there were too many suggestions, or that suggestions included asset names and other Metadata that made search harder.”

We agree so now for new accounts we default to the Tag (actually Tags and Location fields) suggestions only, but if you still want Meta suggestions you can turn that back on in your account Settings > General > Suggestion strategy.

Improved Custom Filters

We’ve improved the way filters work for custom filters.

You have been able to run an OR search in standard system filters for a while by selecting multiple values in the filter.

e.g. Search for Asset type: “video or presentation or document”

This adds a search phrase that combines the selected tags in an OR search.

We call this an “OR sandwich”.

Previously it was not possible to do an OR search in custom filters (e.g. Season).

With this new update - you can now select multiple options in a custom filter, which will run an OR search for multiple values in a custom filter

e.g. Search for Season: “Summer or Autumn”

Support for “OR” search in the URL

Now you can search across multiple tags with an “OR” search via a URL by using a pipe “|” symbol between tags.

Examples:

• /?tags=Chocolate|Strawberry (find Assets tagged either Chocolate or Strawberry)
• /?type=Document|Presentation|Video (find Assets of Asset Type of either Document or Presentation or Video)

This enables more powerful and flexible Album searches or hard coded search for Navs, Menus and other UI elements.

Expert Tip: Remove individual search parameters from a search

Now that OR searches are universally available on Filters. We made an additional change.

You can now remove individual search parameters inside an “OR sandwich” . You can now click the parameter to remove it. Saving some time.

Alternatively you can still click the “x” remove button to remove the whole “sandwich”.

Fixed a bug in Advanced Search

Advanced Search see this article had a small bug that caused the Field selected to reset to Tag after adding a search phrase.

This is now fixed, and the Field stays set to your selection. Tag is still the default.

Asset Preview Modal is now back in Portal (as well as Admin) as a configurable option.

A favourite feature in Brandkit 1 was Asset Previews in search and now they are available in Brandkit 2.

Asset Previews give users a way to see more details about an asset, while maintaining their current position in Search.

Power users rejoice. What’s really cool about the new Asset Preview Modal in Brandkit 2 is keyboard controls.

• left arrow to go to previous Asset
• right arrow to go to next Asset
• space bar to select/deselect

Keyboard controls enable super fast navigation and select.

For now Asset Preview Modals are a configurable option in both Portal and Admin and they can be toggled on and off independently in your account settings by Brandkit support staff. Just let us know if you want this feature on.

Enjoy :)

p.s. one more thing - Semantic Search is coming

In addition to the work we’ve already done sprinkling AI features into tagging and describing Assets. We’ve started work on adding some AI enhancements to Search.

It’s pretty technical stuff but we’re essentially adding a technology called vector maps, to enable semantic searches (aka natural language search). We’ll use AI to create a textual description of an image which is converted into a 3d vector map. These are stored in the database and then used to compare to other vector maps to find matches or close matches when a search is run.

In addition to enabling natural language search queries, it will also enable us to add reverse image searches , a find duplicates function, and a find similar assets function using the same data.

This is a significant piece of work so it may take some time - but the work has started.