Sharing another Great Tool for Steem! Check out Harpoon Search!

Five days ago Hive account@inquiringtimes pointed me at a post that had been released to the blockchain from Hive account@markangeltrueman. This cool little tool is in Alpha, and has admittedly some work still to be done, but it already has some real high points! Check out the post, which is still in time for upvotes!!!

Harpoon Search Alpha is Live

So You guys know I curate for Curie, and when I saw this post at first I thought that this was like using Hive account@carlgnash's queries, but in a browser. So when I first started playing with it, I was using it from the perspective of finding posts to nominate for Curie. At this time, the functionality is not sufficient for what Curie Curators need. But I have high hopes for the future.

But today I thought "What about using Harpoon Search for my New Steemians Piece?" And you know what? It is PERFECT for this. Let's have a look!

First order of business is to head to the home screen for Harpoon Search, which you can see above. This gives you a screen to put in search Parameters. You can play around with these, it seems like some function better than others (Remember, this is a tool in Alpha testing!) for my needs I put in a Reputation Range (25-25) select a language (EN - for English), put "introduceyourself" in Category and hit Submit. The Page will say "Firing Harpoon" (Pretty cool) and spin through the Query, before coming up with a feed like post list that contains basically all the information we are used to seeing on Steemit.com.

The great thing here is that when you select a post, it opens that post in a new tab. Perfect for someone like me trying to curate and look at several things before coming to a decision on them.

This site gives me strictly English Posts in the category I am looking to curate. And unlike the LinqPad, I get to see the thumbnail and current payout right there, and I don't have to copy/paste links to get to the posts.

There are some "caveats" as Mark puts it. Here are the list of known issues:

• Max results returned is 50
• Error messages aren't returned correctly to the UI
• Hard to tell when the database is being querie - no real loading screen.
• A few fields are currently disabled and the search fields look pretty crap
• Search fields have no validation on them but it should be pretty obvious what goes in them. If you put the wrong stuff in, you'll get a crappy error.
• It's using steemsql in the background, and this runs ever so slightly behind the blockchain so you might see a slight delay in posts arriving there - at the moment it seems quite far behind so id recomment viewing posts in the last 60 minutes at the moment.
• Clicking the item header takes you to steemit.
• Some image thumbnails won't load in the results but i'm working on a better image parsing system.
• I've also seen cases with the deployed version where no results are being returned - just reload the screen and it seems to sort itself out.

All in all, as a tool for Curation Guild curating, some of these issues would need to be resolved. But for the casual curator just looking for things in a specific set of results, This can be a terrific tool without any SQL knowledge at all.

I encourage you to play around with this tool and see how it can help you. Head over and give Mark some props for putting this out for us to play with, and make sure you hit him with an upvote in the next 2 days to show appreciation for his work!

Harpoon Search is now a new arrow in my curation quiver to be deployed as needed. Very excited to have it out there on the platform!