MaxisLucky and the Spore webteam have been hard at work adding more features and fine-tuning the search filters on the Sporepedia. Their hard work has payed off, as today MaxisCactus shares the new details with us. Fans will be delighted with the extra filters and fields, making their searches much more easier. Only thing now left to do is to add a Twitter/Facebook/MySpace integration to the creations page so we can easily share off our creatures throughout those social websites. Would make it easier to grab the url of the said creation, because after searching for the ones you want to open, the url contains the whole search string – that if you paste into another window will not lead you to that creature. Either that or I’m having browser problems. I don’t know.

With over 100 million creations uploaded to the Sporepedia, it can be daunting to find just what you’re looking for.

The web team has implemented a new set of search filters that can be applied with search terms! Finding quality content has never been easier.

In addition to making it easier to find quality content, search performance has also been improved! You’ll find that it’s a lot faster to find what you’re looking for.

Galactic Adventures players will find that this makes finding the perfect prop for your adventure a snap. For example, if you search for buildings named “table” from all creations, you’ll find over three thousand results, of a widely varying degree of quality. Now, if you turn on the “highly rated” filter, you’ll get 43 solidly designed tables.

Simple guide to the new search filters:

• Filter search results by Newest
• Filter search results by Highly Rated: Results are limited to quality creations, sorted by relevance
• Filter search results by Recently Highly Rated: Results limited to quality creations, sorted by date
• Filter search results by Featured: Results are limited to featured creations
• Filter search results by All: Equivalent to old way of searching.

Advanced guide to searching:
You can use Lucene search syntax in your searches! This can help you refine your search to show only the content you want.

Boolean Logic
This site is a good reference for how to use Boolean logic operators in your search. You can use -, +, AND, NOT, or OR to refine your search. These are case sensitive.

Fields
You can search specific fields such as author, tags, name, or description. Follow the syntax in the examples below to try this out. You can use terms individually, or in quotes around a phrase.

Examples:
• +tags:banana
• +name:banana
• name:“fishing lure”
• -author:maxiscactus
• +is_original:true (only shows creations with no parent)
• +is_slurped:false (only shows manually-published creations)

Wild cards
Wildcards such as * and ? can be used to modify search terms. Keep in mind that the search will time out if you use a wildcard that leaves the search to broad, such as author:m*. You’ll need to narrow the results to get these to work, for example author:maxis*. More info on wildcards here.

A number of other features including fuzzy searches, range searches, and term boosting are supported. You can find out about how to use these here.

Please take the new search for a spin! Let us know what you think!

http://www.spore.com/sporepedia

New Search FAQ
Q: When I search using the “highly rated” and “recently highly rated” filters, some of the results have neutral faces. Why aren’t they all green?”
A: Once a creation has been rated up enough to qualify as a highly rated creation, it’s automatically entered into the pool of quality creations. Rating decay or subsequent downrates will not affect its presence in this pool going forward.