We are constantly tweaking our search algorithms. In addition, importing new merchants requires relentless work on our product-indexing and crawling code. Hardly a week goes by without numerous small upgrades.

Occasionally, though, more notable (and noticeable) enhancements are in order, and we've just rolled out a handful of such features that we hope you'll find useful.

Custom Price Ranges

This powerful feature is way overdue — we know. Being able to filter by price is one of the most critical tools for a shopping platform. We've long had pre-determined price-range options (calculated by dividing all matching products into four “buckets” and taking the highest/lowest price for each bucket), but those can often have unintuitive price divisions, and sometimes it's just more convenient to provide an explicit range.

So, now you can just plug in your minimum and maximum price when our default “buckets” don't do the trick. Here's how it looks:

[Screenshot of Filtering by Custom Price]

(Improvements to the default price options is also forthcoming.)

Custom Display Currency

One request we've received with some regularity since launching Spendabit is to have the ability to view product prices in terms of BTC. That is now possible. Furthermore, if you're searching for products in the European Union, for example, but wanted to view prices in terms of British pounds or (for whatever reason!) U.S. dollars, you can now do that as well.

Just look for the currency-code in the top-right corner of the screen...

[Screenshot of Currency Option in Site Header]

...And you can click over from there to specify your currency preference.

“Acronym Normalization”

One of the biggest challenges to obtaining good search results has been the fact that merchants can be very inconsistent in how they name and categorize products. Consider the following three hypothetical products:

  • Samsung 750 EVO 500 GB Solid State Drive - SATA - 512 MB
  • 850 EVO Series SSD, SATA 6G - 500 GB
  • Samsung 2.5" 500GB SATA III Internal Solid State Drive (SSD)

All three products are substantially the same — all three are solid-state storage devices (drives) with a 500-gigabyte capacity. However, look at the differing ways in which someone might search for such an item:

  • 500gb ssd
  • 500 gb ssd (note the space after ‘500’)
  • 500gb solid state drive

Using various “normalization” techniques, we now try to display all relevant results regardless of the formatting used by the merchant, and regardless of how you enter the query. Plenty of work remains to be done though, and don't hesitate to let us know if you find keywords or queries where we fall flat.

Come and try it all out!

Onward and Upward

As always, we'll continue to make our relentless behind-the-scenes improvements, and keep your eyes out for a couple larger announcements in the coming months. We hope you're enjoying your summer as well as the present Bitcoin rally!

(Apologies to those not presently in summer... Spring is just around the bend!)