December 3 – Relevance Ranking, Web History, Search: Applying Web Methods to FileMaker

Thank you for joining our webinar titled Relevance Ranking, Web History and Search: Applying Web Methods to FileMaker. Searching for results in Google, usually finds what your looking for. Using a web history to find a site that you’ve visited is usually better than having a ‘back’ button, which is based on your current session. During this webinar, we showed some techniques, sample files, and commercial solutions that focus on solving these challenges with pure FileMaker.

This webinar discussed:

•  Adding ‘record view history’ across multiple tables. This allows each user to see a list of recently-viewed records and navigate to them with a click. It’s simple to implement, and requires a triggered script, one table with just a few fields, and a portal to display records on your home screen.

• The elements of single-field search: Pre-process, Iterate, Rank, Display. We examined these parts of fmSearchResults, a commercial program, and showed how these ideas can be implemented into your solutions. This was not a sales pitch.
• Relevance rank system that learns. As users search for records, refine searches, and click results, Relevance metadata is stored about that interaction. The next time a similar search is done, the Relevance table is searched, and the related record is displayed. We discussed the concept of short vs. long clicks, linking searches to results, and implementing these ideas into your solutions.

Click this YouTube video for those of you that missed the live webinar, or would like to review it.

About the Sponsor and Presenter:

This webinar was offered by the FM Academy, a consortium of leading FileMaker development companies in the United States. All FM Academy members are platinum-level members of the FileMaker Business Alliance, and our purpose is to further educate FileMaker users and developers to encourage best practices and foster further adoption of the software.   The webinar was presented by Matt Navarre, owner of MSN Media in Portland, Oregon.  Matt has been developing databases since 1983, authored the fmSearchResults software, won the FileMaker Evangelist of the Year award in 2011, is certified in every FileMaker version, and hosts the FileMaker Talk podcast.