Big news from behind the scenes at FontShop.com: we’ve built a new search engine to provide more accurate results. The new search is in beta mode right now, and we’d love your feedback.

You can enable the new search engine by specifying a variable in the URL. Let’s say you wanted to search for FF Meta. To view search results with the new search engine, just add &newsearch=1 to the URL.

http://www.fontshop.com/search/?q=FF+Meta&x=0&y=0&newsearch=1

You may not notice much right off, but the new search engine should have provided you with more accurate results sorted in a more relevant way. Any searches you make from that point forward will continue to use the new engine. This preference is saved in your browser cookie so you won’t need to enter the special URL until you want to revert to the old search engine.

You can disable the new search and use our old search engine by changing the 1 to a 0:

http://www.fontshop.com/search/?q=FF+Meta&x=0&y=0&newsearch=0

Smarter Results: Our current search (left) does a decent job of displaying matching products, but the new search (right) offers more helpful results with relevant content, FontLists, and families at the top.

We hope you’ll appreciate the improvements in our new search engine. Please note that in this pre-release stage there’s always a chance of unexpected results, but do contact us or post a comment with any feedback you have.