Suggestion concerning the gear search

[DSiewert]

I'm considering getting a gas grill, and a couple ideas came up that could be added to the search criteria.

First, the options for cost are a bit corse once you hit $1000. Rather than lumping everything between one and two thousand, I'd suggest breaking it down into intervals of 2 or 3 hundred. Maybe once you hit $2000 you could step up to an interval of $500. For my budget, I'm looking for grills between $800 and $1200. More steps makes the search more friendly.

Second, allow search criteria to include your rating (gold, silver, bronze, not recommended, not rated).

Thanks for the web site.

[David Parrish]

This is a good suggestion for Max Good.

I will say though once you get above $1,000 there aren't all that many options, so not sure it really needs to be as granular as $200 ranges. Maybe $500 ranges above $1,000 would work.

[Max Good]

Thanks for your input. It's difficult to be all things to everyone. We felt the search criteria should be as simple as possible, while still performing the desired function of enabling our readers to find cookers that suite their unique needs. This requires use of broad categories. For example, if we structured the Price Category to be in $300 increments, we'd have 23 boxes just for the products that cost up to $7000. As is we have a total of 28 search boxes for all search categories and one still has to scroll down to see them all. Regarding the AmazingRibs.com Best Value Awards, when you do a search, you are presented with a display page that has thumbnails of all the products that fit your search. Products that receive our Gold Medals are displayed first, followed by Silver, Bronze, Not Judged, then Not Recommended. An added benefit of this scheme is exposure to products in addition to the Gold Medal winners. Many decent products receive Silver and Bronze Medals for a variety of reasons.

[DSiewert]

Too many search categories can be problematic. Personally I'd break it into two fill-in-the-boxes: More than XXXX and Less than XXXX. It has a smaller foot-print on the screen, and is easy to use. Your current approach uses discrete buckets and so my comment relates to that. You already have a notion of logarithmic scaling which is good, but I think you've just increased the size of the steps too fast. Totally agree that the higher you go, the bigger the steps should be.