Searching for a table: the filters live in the address

Search on this site is a form with four fields, and the interesting part is not what it does: it is where it ends up.

Four ways to narrow things down

• the text — the name of the place, or a word that describes it;
• the town;
• the kind of cuisine;
• only places that confirm the table straight away — the checkbox that leaves out the ones where the request has to be passed on and may go unanswered. If you are organising for tonight, that is the one to tick.

They combine, and under the results it always says how many you are seeing out of how many: «12 restaurants out of 43» is different information from a list that simply ends.

Where they end up

In the address. Search for a pizzeria in Pistoia that confirms straight away and the bar at the top reads something like ?testo=pizzeria&citta=Pistoia&prenotabili=1: that line is your search. Copy it and send it to whoever is eating with you, and they will see exactly what you see. Bookmark it, and tomorrow it starts from there.

This is not a technical flourish: a search that lives inside the page and vanishes when you close it cannot be shared, cannot be saved, and cannot be followed by a search engine either. For the two most common restrictions there are clean addresses too — /en/city/pistoia, /en/cuisine/pizzeria — which are the same thing written better.

And it works without JavaScript

The form is a plain form: you fill it, you press, and the server answers with the results page. Nothing breaks if the script does not load, if the network is slow, or if the phone is old — which is the condition in which people look for a restaurant while walking, not the laboratory one.

When it finds nothing

Those are two different pieces of news, and they are not written the same way.

• «No restaurant matches these filters» — there is a catalogue, just not with those conditions. The page offers to drop the town or the cuisine, and says something worth knowing: the catalogue currently covers Pistoia and Prato, and grows one province at a time.
• «The catalogue is still empty» — that is not your search, that is us.

An empty list without a line saying which of the two it is sends people looking for the problem on the wrong side.

What a result row holds

The name, where it is, and the label saying whether the table is confirmed at once or has to be requested — which is the most important difference on this whole site, and that is why you see it before opening the listing: it is in another article, and it is worth reading once.