Search in 6.1.1.

[Richard]

We're just testing the new options in Search (6.1.1.) and want to thank
shopsite for listening to us all.
We need an opinion re the following. Most single word searches or searches
for parts of SKU's will now find the item which is great.
Often however we see that customers will search for more than one word and
perhaps incorrectly spell part of a word. A specific example would be say
"timex datalink" - this produces zero results (so does just "datalink") ;
whereas "timex data link" or "data link" (the correct spelling) will find
everything. Forget about customers using boolean searces for the moment.
Is there anyway to currently set the search options to overcome this. One
way of course is to add these potential searches to the "Search Keywords"
field for the products in question but it's impossible to always guess all
options for all products and this would be a time consuming process.. Maybe
I'm missing something in the setup. As far as I can see "STEMS" will only
react to whole words
Richard

[loren_d_c]

There is no way that the search is going to 'guess' how the shoppers
might mispell words, if you can think of common mispellings you can, as
you mention, add these to the Search Keywords (ShopSite Pro) for the
product.

The 'stems' setting (6.1.1) allows you to specify implied wildcards for
whole words, at the end and/or the beginning of the original search
term. So a search for 'data' could find 'datalink' and 'database' if
stemming is enabled at the end of the word. Similarly, if stemming were
enabled at the beginning and end, then a search for 'data link' will
find 'datalink' because it will be a match for both search terms. You
should be careful, though, about trying to get the search to return
results that may be too general. Personally I would probably not enable
the stemming at the beginning of the word, unless a lot of the key
search words you want to have hits on have common prefixes like 'pre' or
're' that a shopper might reasonably leave out of their search term.

You will never get 'datalink' to match 'data link' because there is no
way for the computer to know that the search term is "incorrect" and
also guess what the "correct" search term should be and split the
original term accordingly. In fact, because of the complexity and number
of permutations it would require to make all possible combinations of
search terms from an original term (exponentially complicated by the
number of original search terms), I doubt you will find any general
search engines on the web that will function like that. At the most, you
might find some that will find sigular hits based on plural original
search terms, but that is only because some of them will detect that a
search term ends with an s (or es), strip the s and and use the
resulting term as the actual search term. So you probably couldn't
search for 'mice' and get a hit that only contains the word 'mouse', but
you could probably enter an incorrect term like 'mouses' and get hits
that only contain 'mouse'.

It may not make much sense, but then again a computer does not think
like a human does. To the computer words are just groups of characters
with no special meanings that it can derive any definite implications
from. It is much easier for a human to look at the term 'data link' and
imagine that some other human might mispell it as 'datalink' and add
that to the search terms for the product.

-Loren



Richard wrote:

We're just testing the new options in Search (6.1.1.) and want to thank
shopsite for listening to us all.
We need an opinion re the following. Most single word searches or searches
for parts of SKU's will now find the item which is great.
Often however we see that customers will search for more than one word and
perhaps incorrectly spell part of a word. A specific example would be say
"timex datalink" - this produces zero results (so does just "datalink") ;
whereas "timex data link" or "data link" (the correct spelling) will find
everything. Forget about customers using boolean searces for the moment.
Is there anyway to currently set the search options to overcome this. One
way of course is to add these potential searches to the "Search Keywords"
field for the products in question but it's impossible to always guess all
options for all products and this would be a time consuming process.. Maybe
I'm missing something in the setup. As far as I can see "STEMS" will only
react to whole words
Richard

[Richard]

Thank Loren,
Points noted.
Richard