You can still search [dic] when "less is more"

I found a bug while conducting a search for restaurant safety ratings for Dick’s Drive In via King County’s search user interfaces and notified the county website.

The searches were conducted in relation to this post: public health inspection signs as potential search seeds

I got quick reply that they’ll pass it on and they shared a nice search tip / reminder that sometimes “less is more”: I can also get useful results by searching just [Dic] and [Dick] (though not [Drive]).¹

subject: bug in search restaurant safety ratings interface

to: WebsiteFeedback@kingcounty.gov

Hi, I noticed that I have to manually escape the single apostrophe in Dick’s to search Dick’s Drive-In?

[Dick’s] doesn’t work, you must use [Dick’’s]? @ Search restaurant safety ratings https://kingcounty.gov/en/dept/dph/health-safety/food-safety/search-restaurant-safety-ratings#/

Here is the exception when I search [Dick’s]:

[ omitted ]

Here I cannot tell what the issue is, but I was able to search by address? @ Restaurant inspection information https://info.kingcounty.gov/health/ehs/foodsafety/inspections/search.aspx

Thanks!

Daniel

I also shared this on Twitter.

Re: passing it on (or “I’ll share your message with our inspection search web developer to see if we can get that fixed.”): Emma Lurie and I encountered that phrase a lot in our research for Search quality complaints and imaginary repair: Control in articulations of Google Search (Griffin & Lurie, 2022)

Part of my reply:

That’s nice to know. Thanks! Super helpful.

It’d be really slick to have a little “Search Tip” appear if there are no results (like when searching [Drive]) or an error (though I imagine your logs will tell you if this is a problem worth mitigating in that way or not).

Thank you for the speedy response.

Asides

Here you can see how Yelp presents the inspection reports, with Hazel Analytics providing the data to Yelp. Note that the reader is not provided any direct link to the county health department.

Footnotes

Searches on this interface are not directly linkable (for instance, providing a share link or following the OpenSearch protocol[^seeopensearch]), but you can see the results from public API (which is visible in the console log of error-prone searches):

https://info.kingcounty.gov/healthservices/RestaurantInspectionsPublicAPI/api/business/1/alpha/47.0845/-122.5284/47.7803/-121.0657/0/0/25/Dic

https://info.kingcounty.gov/healthservices/RestaurantInspectionsPublicAPI/api/business/1/alpha/47.0845/-122.5284/47.7803/-121.0657/0/0/25/Dick

https://info.kingcounty.gov/healthservices/RestaurantInspectionsPublicAPI/api/business/1/alpha/47.0845/-122.5284/47.7803/-121.0657/0/0/25/Drive↩︎

References

Griffin, D., & Lurie, E. (2022). Search quality complaints and imaginary repair: Control in articulations of Google Search. New Media & Society, 0(0), 14614448221136505. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448221136505 [griffin2022search]