dronefly-garden / dronefly

Red Discord Bot V3 cogs for naturalists.
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taxon: fallback to fuzzy search for taxa via /v1/search?sources=taxa #81

Closed synrg closed 4 years ago

synrg commented 4 years ago

When a user searches for a taxon and "Nothing found" is returned, it clutters the channel and requires additional work by the user (either by making additional attempts in channel or going to the web) to find the taxon they expected to match. We can help improve the user experience here with better error messages offering guidance as to why their query may have failed, but more importantly, try to avoid the failure in the first place through use of iNat's own "fuzzy match" search through their /v1/search?sources=taxa API. Here are some notes I jotted down earlier on #bot-stuff on the iNat Discord server:

synrg commented 4 years ago

I thought this would help, but the big deal killer is taxa must have the first 5 letters typed accurately or else fuzzy matching does not apply. This means it is only mildly useful and perhaps more annoying with all its false hits than in its ability to accurately return the one thing you were interested in at the top of its list. It hardly seems worth it.