The main reason people come to Book of Odds is to answer one or more of these three questions:

1. What are the odds of that?
2. How can I better understand those odds?
3. What can I do to improve my odds?

Search is indispensible to answering these questions. It can guide the searcher to the exact odds being looked for. It can provide other odds which can be used to set context or make comparisons. It can point to differences in odds based on risk factors, or guide the user to articles about the odds. ( Click here for detailed search instructions).

Soon after the public launch of Book of Odds, it became clear that there were weaknesses in the website's search functionality. This was confirmed by our tracking of search success rates and comments from our users. Since that time, we have devoted ourselves to enhancing the capability of the search algorithm and the associated user experience. After much hard work, Book of Odds is pleased to announce the release of the improved search functionality.

The new approach is characterized by three major improvements:

1. Search for Odds Statements is now separate from search for articles and other content, improving the search approach taken for each type of query.
2. The breadth of possible queries has been expanded and now allows keywords and probabilities to be searched for together.
3. We have vastly improved the way searching can be productively narrowed.

Odds Statements now have their own search pathway, which allows the user to search on both content and value simultaneously. The underlying indexing and searching algorithm has also been changed for Odds Statements, to yield more relevant and interesting results, in part based on feedback from user behavior. For users seeking Book of Odds’ static content, another search pathway provides access to articles, blog posts, and other non-Odds Statement content.

Not only does the new approach give better search results from the start, it allows for vastly improved narrowing of results. One narrowing method refines the result set by a characteristic topic of the Odds Statements and provides an interactive way for users to explore the data. In addition, both Odds Statements and static content can be filtered by various metadata elements, such as demography and geography.

Search is one of those functionalities which can always be improved and we are going to continue to work on further enhancements. In the meantime we hope you will find the experience of search on Book of Odds more productive and interesting than ever.

For a more detailed description of how to use the new search functionality please click here.