New and Improved Site Level Search

Tags ddb-features D&D Beyond

Were you ever baffled by our search finding zero results for firebolt? Maybe you were thwarted by a typo in a monster name? Perhaps you wasted too much time wading through books you don’t own? Not anymore. We rebuilt D&D Beyond search from the ground up, so you find the right rule, monster, or magic item fast.

Hi! Elliot (Core Site Navigation PM) and Adela (Character Tools and back end rebuild PM) here, reporting on our efforts to improve DDB’s site search.

Elliot: Search was a last-minute feature. Nine years ago, just weeks before launch, our lead developer showed up with a hefty Elasticsearch book, a can of iced coffee, and a fighter-pilot-grade headset, built it single-handedly, and moved on to the next fire. Since then, our search languished, slowly devolving into a gibbering mouther of irrelevant results.

Adela here: We began by exploring advanced rules search in Maps but pivoted when we realized that users had trouble with search in general, not only when they searched for rules. Players and DMs couldn’t find what they needed when they accidentally misspelled or capitalized a word, missed a correct result buried beneath forum postings, or had to dig through a mix of owned and purchase-able content. We could fix so much more!

We listened to the community feedback you shared, and rebuilt search so you can find the content you want, faster. Search now has autocomplete and autocorrect, and understands common misspellings, synonyms, and abbreviations. Typing “dark vision” with a space used to put Mordenkainen’s Private Sanctum at the top of your results, but now you get Darkvision.

The new filters let you narrow results by rule set, by whether the content is owned or shared, and even searches within a specific book. It reduces redundant search results, matches the results to the headers in our books, and ranks them by relevance. You can also skip the results page and jump straight to the page you want from the search bar. We even show you a preview of the content of the top result, so you don’t even have to click into another page. We also excluded the forums from the site search, to avoid drowning you in unofficial results.

The new D&D Beyond search showing autocomplete, filters, and a preview of the top result

How it works: Search looks through every book we’ve published on DDB, and potential results are ranked by how relevant they are to what you typed. Canonical entries like spells, rules, and monsters are weighted higher. We can also hand-map words and phrases that keyword search would miss.

That means the abbreviations D&D players use all the time, like CR or AC, still turn up the right results (for challenge rating and armor class), even without an exact keyword match. It also allows us to continually tune our search algorithms to get you better and better results.

All these changes together take us from the previous basic keyword and overly rigid search to a *modern* search function that’s easy to use so that you get to the right rule, monster, or magic item for your game.

This is a significant improvement from where we were before, and based on your feedback, we plan to keep tuning and improving it! So, Give it a whirl and let us know what you think!

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