include schools in directory search

[cosmusic]

Title
include schools in directory search

Short, concise description of the idea
Allow people to include schools (from the schools directory) in a directory search.

Full description of the ideaWe have a Directory, that lets you search by interest, location, friend and friend-of, etc. You can, for example, find everyone who is in California, is

Comments

[cos]

Oops, I posted this suggestion from the wrong account. It should've been from cos.

[adudeabides]

A good idea. They're re-working the directory search function, so it'd be nice if they included this. Though perhaps a bit easier for end users...there are a lot of schools, so the integration would have to be such that it would be easy to use and functional (perhaps something ajax-y to allow proper selection of a particular school since many schools are similarly named and not typing something accurately may return a null result).

[anotherdream]

It'd have to use school IDs - every school in the Directory has a unique number to identify it. There are probably hundreds of Washington Elementary Schools and the like. Not to mention that sometimes the school is named wrong in the Directory. Or people enter a name different from the official one. Or put in the wrong location. Erm. My point being, it would really have to work so that you look up the school in the directory first, then grab the SID, and use that as a criteria in the search. Having users write out the institution names simply isn't feasible.

[adudeabides]

Agreed that the school ID would be the only feasible way of doing this, but you'd have to find an easy way for people to do this. Searching the school's directory and then pullin' the school ID, going to directory search and inputting it...too much work, and perhaps too complicated, for some (many?) users.

[cos]

A facebook-like Ajaxy interface would be a nice thing.

I'd still like to have this capability even if they can't/don't choose to do that, though.

I did describe one shortcut that would make it very easy for normal use. You could go to any profile that has a particular school listed, click on that school, and click on the directory link from there, which would give you a directory search form with that school already selected. That would make it easy to do directory searches for any of your schools or your friends' schools.