It was possible to search the whole world and see on the map what Jobs, Candidates and Companies were listed on the map.

This was fine when we had little data in the database to display to the end user.

However, now that Mapertunity is growing we have a lot more data in the database and if we set the search distance radius to say 10,000 miles to reach around the world from the current map center, it did not crash the system but it did take forever to get the results to display on the map mainly due to all the data we had to flow over the internet. The server was responding lightening fast but the thing that took the most time was pushing that large volume of data out over the internet to the client browser.

The results eventually did display.

So we did a rethink of how to display results.

It is still possible to search out 10,000 miles or 25,000 miles radius however, we implemented a new “Nibbler” feature.

Page” is usually used when displaying say 25 results or a page worth of data to the end user. But with a map, we had no existing vocabulary for “partial set of total results on a map. This was a totally new need. So it just came out “Get next nibble” and display that on the map.

The Nibbler allows the user to display 25, 50 or 100 results at a time per nibble. The total number of Nibbles are still found and available to the end user, but the users will now have to step through the nibbles with the Nibble Navigation tool of they wanted to see all search results displayed on the map.

The server still displays the total number of results found in the database but it only pulls full data for the active Nibble.

The response time of Mapertunity went from “Frozen” to “Pretty Good”. 

So we think this will a better user experience.