Fragrance Search Engines Are Lame

[erickson]

I have tried the search engines on both Basenotes and Fragrantica, but they are quite lame.

Take something as simple as searching for frags with wood and citrus notes. If you do not specify the specific note they have entered in their database for that frag, it will not be returned in your search. If you only want frags with cedar and lemon notes that is fine, but if you want to be more general in your search you cannot simply search for woods and citrus. If you search for woods and citrus you will only get those frags which list synthetic woods and synthetic citrus notes. Your search will not return any frags which include cedar, cypress, pine or any other specific woody note, nor will your search return any frags which include lemon, lime, orange, grapefruit or any other specific citrus note.

I have discovered that it isn't the individual notes which are important anyways, but it is the accords which matter most. There may be notes which you cannot even detect in one frag, yet in another frag that same note may overpower all other notes. But again, the search engines at Basenotes and Fragrantica do not have any option to search for accords.

Also, I have discovered a reviewer on Basenotes who has pretty much the same tastes as I do, but once again I have found no way to isolate a search by reviews and reviewers.

Anyone else notice these serious limitations to fragrance search engines?

 

[JetsMets#1fan]

For what it's worth most forum search engines are sorry. Just try your search on google and add "basenotes" at the end of you are looking for and you may get quicker and better results. I do the same with this forum.

 

[john parker]

Had not noticed that specifically. Interesting point. Have a feeling that most any search engine will have that same limitation until one gets into fuzzy logic. Not sure it answers your problem, but believe you can do a search on a member's named; perhaps by looking that the posts made by the member you can sort out something. Or just pm the member.

 

[BillC]

Unless you build a hierarchy - Woods [includes evergreen(includes Pine, Cedar), Oak] - and either the natural language processing to parse it or enforce the hierarchy on the users you can't get what you want. Fragrance reviews would be interesting to process in this manner but I'm afraid I'd be laughed at if I took that forward as a serious proposal for research

With regards to google searches, the google engine has some pretty sophisticated controls (nothing fragrance related that I'm aware of) but if you want to, for instance, just search B&B you can end your search with 'site:badgerandblade.com' without the quotes and it will search only this site. This is more restrictive than just tossing in badgerandblade as a search term because that search would return links for other websites that include a reference to here.

 

[Omp]

For what it's worth most forum search engines are sorry. Just try your search on google and add "basenotes" at the end of you are looking for and you may get quicker and better results. I do the same with this forum.

Even better way is to type the following into google
site:basenotes.net citrus wood

And Bob's your uncle

 

[erickson]

Unless you build a hierarchy - Woods [includes evergreen(includes Pine, Cedar), Oak]

You suggesting a search of "woods" includes pine, cedar, oak, etc? That is not the case on either Basenotes or Fragrantica. That is what I wish it did, but it only returns notes specifically containing the word "woods". i.e...

1) "woods" returns: woods, warm woods, white woods, precious woods, amber woods, etc...
2) "wood" returns: all the above in addition to agarwood, cedarwood, sandalwood, woody notes, wood musk, etc
3) neither will return: bamboo, birch, cedar, cypress, fir, maple, oak, pine, sequoia, spruce, etc...

This is another reason why having the ability to search on accords would be helpful because that is actually what I am trying to do here is search for a woody accord and not just for notes which happen to have the word wood in them.

 

[BillC]

Nope - I'm suggesting that you have to build and enforce such a hierarchy when the reviews are written or you need to write software that does what's called natural language processing - meaning the software has that hierarchy built into it and can understand the context within the posts. Neither is trivial though it seems like it should be because our brains are so good at it.

 

[StylinLA]

Nope - I'm suggesting that you have to build and enforce such a hierarchy when the reviews are written or you need to write software that does what's called natural language processing - meaning the software has that hierarchy built into it and can understand the context within the posts. Neither is trivial though it seems like it should be because our brains are so good at it.

If the Basenotes directory were able to search by woods and citrus, it would probably yield a few hundred scents. Those are very commonly used in many men's frags.

As to the reviewer, find a post by said reviewer...click on his name...click on view profile...you should see a link to "view reviews."

 

[YoungerThanMyRazor]

http://fumefinder.com/m/#/m/fragrancepicks/

I've found this to be simple, but some what helpful. I've also found youtube and basenotes pretty helpful. But, I always stop here first.

 

[MrDentini]

Interesting idea, it would be nice to build a user-assigned tag-based fragrances search engine.

 

[Renato1]

Also, I have discovered a reviewer on Basenotes who has pretty much the same tastes as I do, but once again I have found no way to isolate a search by reviews and reviewers.

At Basenotes, after you find one review by the person who's taste accords with yours, under his icon it say "Show all reviews". Click on that and you'll see all his reviews.
Regards,
Renato

 

[Lamb Root]

There is another way that includes some work and input from your side. It's called Shave Wiki. If you know what you like, and you know it's a citrus, and there's no written document on it (particular scent) on Shave Wiki, than create a new page under that scent's name. It'll cost you about 15 minutes of your time.
I know, it works backward, but it's also fun.