I have really slow internet and using the search bar for a species or when uploading observations the input species name box often takes up to a minute loading the correct result when a taxon name or part of a name is typed in.
In these situations typing in the numerical ID often returns the correct result in a matter of (milli)seconds.
If you also have slow internet and long loading times for search queries, I would recommend you try typing the taxon id instead.
Maybe there is a backend reason as to why letters take longer to load and maybe this process could be more efficient and this loading time could actually reduced?
this could be helpful for those times when I have a taxon page (with associated ID) in my browser history. unfortunately for every other case, I’m not going to memorise hundreds of ID numbers, so I’d probably have to look up the taxon just to obtain the ID in the first place. I suppose one could also pull down a specific list of taxon IDs based on filter criteria e.g. using the API but that feels a bit silly for someone on the lightweight side both of number of observations/IDs and of computer know-how…
When you type letters, the computer is searching for those letters in all languages, not just the ones you have common names displaying in and the scientific name. I’ve typed “ant” and gotten “moose”, which happens to be called “ant” in Catalan. My second and third native languages are French and Spanish, but “ant” doesn’t resemble any word for a deer in either language that I know. When you type the number, the computer goes right to the record with that number.
However, it’s much easier for me to remember “ave” than the number when I want to identify something as a bird, or “aranea” for a spider (‘ñ’ takes four keystrokes on my layout).
(look up in Wiktionary) It turns out there is a word “ante” in Spanish for “moose”, but it’s uncommon and I’m more familiar with “alce”, which coincides with the start of the scientific name and is cognate with “elk”. “Ant” is from Arabic, and “orignal” is an alteration of a Basque word.
Throughput or latency? I have a satellite connection, so my throughput is fast but my latency is high. It takes me a few seconds to get a response when typing a name.