- by PetsFindly
- 2 min read
An empty results page is a bad answer to a reasonable question. It tells you nothing about why, and it invites you to conclude the marketplace is empty when what is actually true is that your search was narrow.
So Find Match climbs a ladder instead, one rung at a time, and stops on the first rung that has anything on it.
The three rungs
The first rung is the exact search: the same breed, within 50km. If that returns anything, you are done and no loosening is reported.
The second drops the breed and keeps the distance. Any breed within 50km, which is where a related breed can now score its 15 points.
The third puts the breed back and triples the radius to 150km. Breed first, distance second: somebody looking for a specific breed usually means it, and would rather travel than compromise.
You are always told which rung answered
The response carries the rung it stopped on, and the screen says so in words. A silent widening would be worse than an empty page: you would be reading a list of animals that do not meet the constraint you set, with nothing to tell you that had happened.
The rung is remembered with the results, so it is still there when you come back to the same set rather than being recalculated into something else.
When the ladder does not apply
A source listing that is not for breeding gets similar listings rather than the breeding ladder, and that is reported as its own kind of loosening. A search that finds nothing at any rung is told plainly - and the empty answer is remembered too, so clicking again does not silently spend the same work twice.
