As you may have already noticed, lately we've been testing a new search interface for Octopart. We're happy to announce that after a month of testing and bug-fixes we're rolling out the new interface to everyone:

http://octopart.com/partsearch

Previously, the Octopart interface was built with a combination of server-side HTML and client-side JavaScript. That was okay for simple queries but to handle parametric search in the browser we had to start from scratch and build a pure-JavaScript application that uses the Octopart API to serve queries directly to the browser. The new interface should be prettier and much more responsive than the previous one. Hopefully you like it as much as we do!

For those of you using Internet Explorer versions 6 and 7, we wanted to improve your experience as well so we built a new interface optimized for Internet Explorer (http://octopart.com/simple). Your browser will automatically choose the best interface for your computer so there's no need to do anything special. Just type in a search and that's it.

Please try out our new interface and let us know what you think (contact@octopart.com)!