Find any ship we have heard, not just the ones in range
Last night somebody arrived at the ship tracking page with a plan. They opened My fleet, pasted the IMO numbers of ten AIDA cruise ships into the search box, got nothing back, tried the ship names, then just "AIDA", and then left. Six searches, six empty answers.
We had every one of those ships on file, with MMSI, IMO, type and length, all learned from earlier AIS messages. The search just never looked there. It only knew about vessels inside the areas our feed is subscribed to at that moment. A cruise ship crossing the North Sea at night was outside all of them, so as far as the search box was concerned it didn't exist.
That's fixed. Here's what changed.
Search covers the ships we know about, not only the ones in range. Each query now checks two places: live traffic, and every commercial vessel our feeds have heard in the past year. A ship that's live comes back with its speed, the same as before. A ship that's out of range comes back marked "out of range now", and you can still star it. Once it's in your fleet, the fleet watcher follows it wherever our AIS sources can hear it, and its position shows up when one arrives.
IMO numbers work. Type the seven digits, with or without "IMO" in front. MMSI works too, as before. IMO is the number printed on the hull and in every cruise brochure, so it's usually the one people have to hand.
Lists work. Separate them with commas, semicolons or new lines, or paste a column from a spreadsheet. A run of numbers separated only by spaces also gets split. Names with spaces stay together, so "EVER GIVEN" is one ship. If a string of names separated by spaces finds nothing as a whole, the search tries each word on its own, so "AIDAnova AIDAcosma AIDAperla" finds three ships. One query takes up to twenty terms.
Name search matches the start of a name. "AIDA" finds the whole AIDA fleet and "Queen" finds the Queens. It doesn't match a word in the middle of a name, because that would mean scanning our whole list of ships on every keystroke.
One catch with names: we only began storing them today. IMO and MMSI search work for every ship on file right away. Names fill in as ships send their next AIS static message, which comes about every six minutes from anything under way, so most active ships will be searchable by name within a day. Ships that players have already caught or starred get their names from a one-off backfill.
Private boats still don't show up. Leisure craft are never stored in the first place, for the same privacy reasons they're anonymised on the map.
If you have a ship you follow, search for it by IMO and star it.