I noticed that the search engine is not very smart, or rather it searches for "exactly" what you tell it to and that is about it.

As an example, if you do a search for "car", or "jeep", any listings or categories that have "cars" or "jeeps" in their title or description are not found.

Another example is keywords in domain names. For example, one of my sites has the domain name AAAClipArt.com, which is also the sites' title, and yet it does not come up for a search for "clipart".

Are there any plans to make the search engine look for things like this in the near future? If not, the search engine will be cutting out alot of legitimate search results.



Rob Bartlett
AAA Internet Publishing, Inc.
http://www.AAAInternet.com

Hi Rob,

The search engine can do substring searches right now, go to search.cgi to see the options that are available. We plan to make options in the setup for what the default behaviour of search.cgi is.

Cheers,

Alex

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Gossamer Threads Inc.

One other thing, the search engine will match 'cars' if you search for 'car', but won't match 'scar'. It has to match from the beginning of the word. If you don't like this behaviour you can use the non indexed search (available as an option), but the performance isn't as good for large databases.

Cheers,

Alex

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Gossamer Threads Inc.

Ok, kewl, I will have to have a look at the file. =)



Rob Bartlett
AAA Internet Publishing, Inc.
http://www.AAAInternet.com

Would you be able to rate the difference in performance between an indexed and non-indexed search and also about what size the database would have to be for this to make a significant difference?


Rob Bartlett
AAA Internet Publishing, Inc.
http://www.AAAInternet.com

Oops, I meant, go to search.cgi in the browser, and you can see that you can set boolean logic and substring there. Also +word, -word, "some phrase" are also available.

Cheers,

Alex

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Gossamer Threads Inc.

Hi Rob,

Your best bet is for you to judge on your own data/hardware. Simply go to Setup->Misc Options and try switching the index back and forth.

Cheers,

Alex

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Gossamer Threads Inc.

Alex, it appears that there is something wrong with the logic for the advanced search form...

I tried this using the default template. It doesn't matter what settings I choose, if I try to do a search with more than one word, there are no search results! I made certain that the searches I was doing were for valid, contiguous terms and this didn't seem to make a difference.

Completing a regular search without all of the options works fine, it is just the advanced page that does not work. Also, if I do a search for a single word on the advanced form, the search works fine.

Now here is what is really strange, this only happens when "search_indexed" is set to no. I turned it back to yes and everything appears to work fine.

Any thoughts?


Rob Bartlett
AAA Internet Publishing, Inc.
http://www.AAAInternet.com

Hi,

This is a bug and has been fixed..

Cheers,

Alex

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Gossamer Threads Inc.