We're in the planning stage of a redesign of IOTG's Advanced Search page to make it easier to do some of the most common searches ("OWAs that were filled in November 2009") as well as some seriously granular searches (as in, "all WME's sold specs from the second half of 2009 not taken out by Mike Esola"), and I thought I'd ask for some help from the crowd:  

Can you suggest a few websites that you think do advanced search particularly well?  

And more specifically to the film development business, what are some of the searches you do (or would do, if you were a subscriber) on a regular basis that you'd like to see coded into a single button?

Thanks in advance…

That's more like it.  The bugs we identified yesterday have been fixed (only our few "Basic" subscribers were affected, fortunately) and the site is humming along nicely.  Here are the two major new features and enhancements we just completed:

• Improved Search Results/Browse Page Navigation:  We added three major enhancements to help you browse through lists of projects, people and companies.  It's easier than ever to surf through large numbers of records.
• "Thumbtack" Feature:  Until we can develop a proper "My Account" feature, where you'll be able not only to manage your own account details but create and manage your own lists of people, projects and companies, we wanted to give you a way to at least flag projects that you want to keep an eye on.  Hence the new thumbtack field, a checkbox that you can turn on and off at will and persists whether you're logged into the system or not, just like your private notes.  Clicking on the thumbtack icon in the column headers doesn't sort by that column, unfortunately (that's beyond the platform's capabilties at this point), but it will show you just the flagged items in a set of search results, and then clicking on the icon a second time shows you just the unflagged items.  To see the entire set of results again, you'll need to re-do your search, which isn't the most elegant solution, but one works with what one has.

In addition to the above new features, we've also made a number of smaller but cool improvements:

• Once you've entered your username and password, you can just hit "return" instead of having to click on the "Login" box to log in.  This happens now both on the Home page as well as when you log in from the "Subscribe" page.
• On the Home page, management companies now show up in the Spec Grid Snapshot in the Representation column (previously, only agencies were showing up).  Also, the date indicated in that Snapshot is the "Date Logged," instead of the date last updated, so you can see the progression of specs as they hit the market.
• Also on the Home page, the date in the OWA Grid Snapshot is the "Date Last Updated," which since our launch has become more meaningful (at the time, all the dates showed the date we uploaded our database into the system).
• Over on the Browse page, projects listed under the OWAs, Specs and All Projects tabs start out sorted by the date last updated, but you can sort alphabetically by title by clicking on the column header.  Now that we've added the Previous/Next buttons and the "Page XX of YY" navigation features, browsing through long lists becomes much easier.
• Also on the Browse page, we've made the "Project Status" column more useful by adding each project's OWA, ODA and Development priority values.  So rather than simply seeing that someing is "in development," you can also see at a glance whether it's being fast tracked and whether it needs a writer or a director, and how urgently.

There are a bunch of other small tweaks that you may or may not notice, as well.  Next up for our short-term development schedule:  A major overhaul of our Advanced Search feature, plus adjustments to the layouts of the detail pages.

If you haven't checked out IOTG yet, there's no reason not to:  We've extended our no-risk, free trial period to three business days.  So sign up, see if it's for you, and if not, just shoot an email to customerservice at itsonthegrid dot com within those three days and we'll deactivate your account and delete your payment information, no questions asked.