Intro to visual searching

In this short video we’re going to learn how to create a simple search strategy.

The best way to get started is to simply go to app.2dsearch.com and you’ll see a screen like this, with a drawing canvas on the left and a results pane on the right. At the moment our results pane is connected to Bing but you can see that other options are available. Note also that we can hide the results pane and show it at any time using this button. We also have various menu options available on the left which we’ll come to shortly.

To get started, we simply enter terms on the canvas. For example I can enter the terms hello and world and as I enter these terms, the results pane on the right updates dynamically. It starts to get interesting when we manipulate the objects on the canvas. For example, if I drag one term over the other it creates a new group with the default Boolean operator OR. Notice how the results pane on the right has again updated, showing this Boolean expression. If I want to change the operator I can simply edit it like this.

If I make a mistake I can just click the undo or redo buttons up here. Or I could just select an object and hit delete. I can create new terms or groups by copying and pasting like this. And I can add a negative term by entering it on the canvas and selecting the menu option apply not. If we want to see how our search looks as a traditional Boolean expression, we can click on the query tab.

In the next video, we’ll look at how to apply this to some real world searches.