DriverGuide Blog

A very minor change, but some of you may notice it and be curious, clicking search results now no longer opens the result in a new window.

We just deployed a major enhancement of the driver search indexing! We’re now weighting drivers differently based on meta-information about them which is independent of the search terms used. Previously, the relevance ranking of the search results was based solely on our matching the search terms against the text describing the driver. The newly deployed enhancement causes the relevance ranking to now also factor in broader meta-information about the drivers, such as user ratings and number of downloads.

We’ve given our sign up process a bit of a face lift!  Ugliness is out, beauty is in!  See for yourself!

We did a lot of reworking of the internals of our browse pages.  All will look the same, but there have been some significant changes under the hood. Most of the code has been revised and greatly optimized, and should be significantly more efficient!

From today 9/28 until 10/7 no membership is required to try out our great new search system!

We just completed the upgrade to PHP 5.  With a site as big and complex as ours, upgrading from PHP 4 was no simple matter!  We had to test, and test, and test, and fix lots of little issues that we expected, and some we didn’t.  But, it’s now done and we are live!  Hope PHP 6 won’t be coming soon!

You may notice in the header of each page we now have little flags indicating a few of the most common languages of our members.  Click one and see the site in that language!  Google has taken an interesting approach, combining automated language translation with user-submitted improvements.  Vive la difference!

We’ve completely revamped our search engine!  Not only do we have a whole new backend which is far superior, providing much better matches, with much more relevancy, but also we’ve got an amazing new faceted interface and result display that lets you find the files you need with much more control and less confusion!

The new faceted lets you drill down to the results you want by showing you the filters available to you which match items in the search results!  So if you search for “photosmart 7550″ we’ll find all the companies, device types, and operating systems that match those keywords and show you how many results are found for each.  And in this case you’ll quickly see that “Hewlett-Packard”, “printer”, and “XP”  is what you want for filters, and a few clicks will show you just the results you wanted. Try it today!

Windows 7 is coming, and DriverGuide is ready for it!  If you’ve got access to the Windows 7 beta and there are drivers you’re looking for, search here!  We’ve got quite a few.