Indexed Search

[dgertgen]

I have been trying to add search options to my main page. I want to let people select the make, model and year of their vehicle but have been running into problems. I'm trying to use one of the templates included within shop site but the fields have not been showing up. Can anyone give me some advice?

Thanks in advance,

Dennis

[Jim]

ShopSite indexes keywords in any text that is in the fields specified for search indexing. ( Preferences > Search Settings > Search Indexing > Indexable Products Fields: ). It does not keep track of which field the indexed words come from. This makes it difficult to make a search for a specific category such as "make, model and year of their vehicle"

In ShopSite 9 a "Relevance" can be assigned to each of the Indexable Product fields This allows you to specify which fields are most important when it comes to searching for terms. Search results will be returned with the most relevant search terms first. So the best way to improve your search results would be to select a field from the indexable product fields and put the key words for your products in that field. Then set the relevance for that field higher than other fields. You could put other key words in other indexable product fields and set this field to have a slightly lower relevance setting.

So for example you could have one field contain the make, one the model, one the year. Then when someone searches for a specific make, model and year the most appropriate results would be returned.

If you want canned searches (i.e a dropdown list with certain selections) you could hand code those values and create a custom search form with the search terms being pulled from the dropdown list.

[bakerman]

Does anyone have a working example I can look at? I am interested in creating this functionality into our template.

[Jim]

The Als demo store that you can get from http://shopsite.com/demo.html#manage
and click on the link
Try Managing Al's Tool Store, a ShopSite Pro store
uses a hand coded search based on brand. You can get a demo store at the link above and look at the code that makes this pulldown search option in the custom page template AlsDemo.