New and improved site search engine

[ACE99]

Let's face it, OSC needs a better search engine. The current one sucks. We need something like Amazon or the big guys. Why doesn't this engine return related category pages for example? I have a list here of things I'd like in a new search engine, and maybe someone will help me build it.

 

The new search engine will be based on The Search Enhancement contribution that searches in product descriptions and keeps a log of all customer queries in the databse. This is an awesome improvement, and I'd like to add to it. Here are my suggestions:

 

1. Only complete words will be searched. So searching for ?ant? will not bring up other words with the letters ?ant? in it, such as "anti" etc. Currently the search enhancement searches for every instance of the group of letters searched, and not as just one word.

 

2. Names of Category pages will be queried with each search too, and displayed first on the results page. So if someone types in ?ants? they will also get a link to the ants category page. We may have to make the engine search more that just the title of the category, because that may be too narrow. For example, if I search for ?ant? and I have a category called ?ants?, then that category wouldn?t show, if only titles of cats were searched! (a more advanced search engine could actually put the number of products found under each category in parentheses after the category name)

 

3. Items will be returned as they are now, but under the title of the product there will be a part of the product description which contained the searched word (with the searched word in bold (or a different color) and 5-10 words before that word and 15 words after will be displayed). This can be an option to be turned on or off.

 

4. Add a field to the New Product page in the Admin where search terms can be entered for the product to be used by the site?s search engine. Or, utilize the fields already set up if the Header Tags Controller contribution is installed.

 

The search engine could even return the description of the product found in the page description meta tag! Now that would be cool! Instant product descriptions for all returned results! But again, the searched term would show up in bold within the displayed description, if that makes sense.

 

5. The engine will also knock off the ?s? at the end of the search terms and search for that word too. So ?ants? will also find ?ant?. I think this is built into the search enhancement contribution but it?s kinda buggy.

 

6. Search term will be place at the top of the results page. For example: ?Search results for Ants:?, or "Your search for Ants returned 22 results".

 

7. Back button will be removed from search results page. Since the search box is always visible anyway, why have a back button? Plus, I want to get rid of the advanced search completely.

 

(All these options can be turned on/off via the admin)

 

Other ideas:

 

1. Recommended products for each search term

2. "You may also want to try:" and then list other relevant searches.

3. If "brown recluse spider" doesn't show any results, then return "Your search returned no results, but "spider" returned 22 resutls:" and then show the query results for "spider".

 

Please give me your feedback. ANY OTHER IDEAS YOU'D LIKE TO SEE?

Implementation suggestions?

[Guest]

for your item #1, people like to be able to type in partial words, etc, not exact words as you are proposing.

if you modify advanced search to include other fields, it works well, as i have done that on a few of my customer sites.

i also have included additional fields which were added to the database, it works well.

one thing you can install is the soundex function, to understand more on that search on php.net and mysql.com, it explains lots more.

for #3 if you have the product description contrib installed, takes care of that.

#4 a contributions exists for that also.

#5 soundex takes care of that

#6 is with the contributions above

#7 is if in advanced search and decide to not search, can use that.

For other ideas #2 is a contribution which i use all the time

For other ideas #3 use the 'or' and you will get that

[ACE99]

What is the contribution that does #4? What are the contributions for the other numbers?

 

Thanks!

[azziman]

id like to know what the contribution used are as well

[DavidF]

I have been looking for a contribution that would work for #2. Does anyone know what it is?