Keywords, tags, and searching

[Nutter]

Is there a way (contribution, etc) to tag each item in a store similar to the tag clouds that are so popular on blogs? Then, have a search ability based on those tags.

 

What I'd like to do is assign keywords to each of my items (red, blue, dvd, mouse, etc) and be able to have each of those keywords linked to the search results. So there'd be a link from item #123 that's keyworded "red" to all the other items that are keyworded "red".

 

What I'm thinking is a line on the bottom of each item page like "Keywords: red, blue, green, mouse, dvd".

 

Does something like this exist? Every time I try to search for tags or keywords all the results come back with meta tag type results.

[kgt]

Just adding the phrase "Keywords: red, blue, green, mouse, dvd" to the product description will bring up that product when doing a search.

 

Don't know of any contributions.

[Nutter]

I may be making this more difficult than it should be. Check my thinking please...

 

I type "Keyword: red, blue, green, mouse, dvd" at the bottom of the description with each of the words linking to a search result page with those words. Another item with "Keyword: red, yellow, mustache" would come up with the red search because it's used in the description as well, correct?

 

In that case it's just a matter of me having the right links in place in the description and this is much easier than I thought.

 

Thanks.

[kgt]

Correct.

 

The only caveats I can think of that you might not like:

 

1. Searches for descriptions on keyword red will bring up products with red in the title, or red in the text of the description (not the keywords part of the description). So it won't be a keyword search on just a "keywords" field.

 

2. You'd have to edit the description of every product to manage the keywords.

[Nutter]

Well my keywords are pretty simple - color, size, theme. So I'm not too worried about having to change "red" to "maroon" down the road. Although I suppose if I needed to I could write a script to edit the db field rather than having to do it manually.

 

And I'm not worried about only searching on the keyword field. If I have "a red balloon" in the description and they search for the keyword "red" it's great if the red balloon comes up too.

 

Here's what I wound up doing.

1 - As part of the description I have a table at the very bottom with a row that's 'Keyword|red,blue,green'.

2 - I added a function to the product_info.php file that does a regex to pull out those keywords, sort them, create a link to the advanced search script, and replace them.

3 - When the product description is echoed it is run through that script. If there isn't a keywords row in the table then nothing happens, if there is it creates the links.

 

It took me about 30 minutes to get the regex working right, but now that it's done I can just type in whatever keywords I want and the links are done for me.