Metadata search engine enhancements

The Cardano BI metadata search engine has been called the "Google of Cardano Metadata" and is a vital tool for easy access to Cardano metadata. The tool has been around since January 2021 and is one of our site's most popular functions. The beauty of this search engine is that metadata is readily available as long as you know what the metadata contains. No need to know the address or Cardano internal transaction id's to find a metadata message. Simply search for the text content you remember is part of the message and you can view it. 

Since the search engine was released, a lot has changed. At that time, metadata was new and only used by the community developers for experiments and tests. Today, transaction metadata is used for all kinds of use cases and projects on Cardano and usage is only increasing! The number of potential search hits is increasing with several thousands each day.

To make our search engine even better and ready for a future where simple searches for "Cardano" will return millions of search hits, we ask Catalyst for funding of the following enhancements

• Let users display search hit list directly if they want. Default today is to display number of search hits
• Add more filtering options, for example metadata by type, by key, by month...
• Paging functionality to navigate search hits in manageable portions when thousands of hits are returned
• Popular / most searched for phrases
• Popular / most viewed metadata messages
• Highlighting of searched for phrases in result list
• Search speed / response time improvements

We expect the search enhancements to be ready within 2 months after proposal funding is secured by the Cardano community voters.