If there's one thing we're regularly praised for, it's the depth of our events calendar. We have nearly 3,000 local events a week, all neatly categorized -- everything from the big show at the AAC to the elementary school spelling bee.

But, if there's one thing we're regularly criticized for, it's that it gets increasingly hard to separate your wheat from my chaff when trying to use such a broad and deep calendar.

Solving this problem is tougher than it sounds. We've been working at it for some time. And, frankly, we still haven't completely licked it.

But, we think we're making some steps in the right direction with our new event search, and we'd like to ask you to help us take it the rest of the way by experimenting with it and helping us understand what will better help you plan your evening and/or weekend.

We're working on a screencast to better explain it, but the general idea is that in addition to searching by keyword or browsing the full list, you can narrow by:

• A date or range of dates



• A geographic radius



• A broad or narrow category or categories of event

Used right, this is a very powerful tool. For instance, you can search for jazz, family and dining events near your house next Sunday.

It's that "used right" that we're still concerned with. The new interface is powerful, but complex. We're not sure that it's intuitive enough. But, we're not sure how to simplify it without neutering it.

So, we're doing something we've shied away from in the past -- We know it's not "done," but we're punting it out there anyway. We're hoping you'll play with it and give us some feedback on what works; what doesn't; and what, if anything, is confusing.

A few things we already know we need to do: We're going to create some deeplinks to the most commonly-sought event types like concerts and plays. And we need to make the map feature a little more intuitive.

But while we tinker, please kick the tires. We could use some fresh eyes and ideas...