3 Icons Make A Database More Viewer Friendly.

Resumé:
Search by icons (pictograms) is faster than by text input. A click on an icon replaces text input. A single byte represents an icon.

"A picture tells a thousand words". Full-text search can do with less than that, however, several words connected with AND and OR might be required.

Advantages uf using icons:

Icons can be created using fonts containing sprites that can be downloaded from many websites.

Icons are self-explanatory. An ALT text appearing when the cursor moves over an icon offers additional help.

Icons can be represented by one byte as long as there are less than about 200. If there ar more, icons representing searchable concepts are represented by 1 byte, the rest by 2 bytes. A practical icon size in .GIF format is 45 x 45 pixels. When optimized they are smaller than 1 kB.

A listing taken from the accommodation directory where Findfast is implemented:

Almara B&B					Closed 23 December - 2 January
					226 Collins Avenue West Whitehall, Dublin 9 County Dublin					39.50 Breakfast included
Features about the area				Map of the region				All entries this area

Some icons are categorized to distinguish regions, accommodation types, price ranges, distances from airports and beaches or accommodations sub-types like No smoking or Smokers welcome.

The 3-dimensional array has fields where sequences of bytes represent icons.

If for instance 1 - 9 represent Regions 1 - 9, D represents price range D, P represents Pets welcome, p represents No pets, b represents Bed-and-Breakfast, a search for a B&B in Region 1 in price range D where pets are not allowed would result in Findfast searching the array for the string "p1BD". If no such string is found search is repeated for "p1B" (B&B in Region 1 where pets are not allowed, any price range). The above listing (price range C) would be displayed.

Other icons like Church nearby or Car Rental or Coffee Tea or Pub would not be searchable properties (In Ireland there is always a church and a pub nearby).

Icons are in use in many content sites, but not used to make an on-site search engine viewer friendly.

4 Part of the Findfast package:
   A program to create listings online or offline
   in a standardized format.

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