Search issues

[palex]

Hello,
Is there something that needs to be done to initialize searching? I have uploaded a small sample of products, none of which is appearing when a search is performed. I had tried searching for keywords in the product name, as well as SKUs. All of the default settings for searches are intact.

Thanks!

[Jim]

The product must be assigned to a ShopSite generated page. The page must have the checkbox for indexing checked. At least 1 ShopSite generated page must also have a search form on it. These settings are near the bottom of the Edit Page Info screen
Product Search Field: Check here to add a product search field to your page.
Index: Check here to have this page indexed for product search

You must also enable the checkbox to have the index created at publish time check on Utilities > Publish > screen.

[palex]

For each page, under Edit Page Content (advanced info), both of these are checked:

Check here to add a product search field to your page.
Check here to have this page indexed for product search

Under Utilities -> Publish, this is also checked:
Index for search during update

I imagine these are all defaults, but still no luck.

[Jim]

What version of ShopSite and what product level is your store? (click on the ShopSite above the navbar in the back office and in the footer between the two ShopSite logos it will tell you something like ShopSite® Pro 11 sp2 r3, StoreID: jimsp2
What is the url to your store?
What words are you searching for?
Are there numbers that you are searching for? If so have you checked the option to index numbers? (Preferences > Search Settings > Search Indexing)
Are the words you are searching for in the Stoplist on the Preferences > Search Settings > Search Indexing? If they are remove them since that is a list of words that won't be indexed.
Are your pages being generated by ShopSite or are you using Order Anywhere links?
Are the products assigned to a page?
What is the Search Destination set to on Products > Edit Product info > Search Destination? (assuming you have a ShopSite Pro store)
Have you added any search keywords on the Products > Edit Product info screen?

[palex]

ShopSite Pro 11 sp1

http://palexbooks.com/store/index.html

I have put a small sample (9) of book listings:

Elements of Business Writing: A Guide to Writing Clear, Concise Letters, Mem, 1/e
Elements of Technical Writing, 1/e
Kant: Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals, 1/e
Human Factors Engineering, 1/e
Electronics Dictionary for Technicians, The, 1/e
White Collar Crime in America, 1/e
Masterpieces of the Drama, 6/e
Psychological Testing, 7/e
Language Skills in Elementary Education, 4/e

Searching for words such as "Elements", "Drama", etc. should give results, but none is currently appearing.

All pages are being generated by ShopSite. Here is the page file upload:

Elements of Business Writing: A Guide to Writing Clear, Concise Letters, Mem, 1/e 9780020080954.htm Elements of Business Writing: A Guide to Writing Clear, Concise Letters, Mem, 1/e~9780020080954
Elements of Technical Writing, 1/e 9780020130857.htm Elements of Technical Writing, 1/e~9780020130857
Kant: Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals, 1/e 9780023001406.htm Kant: Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals, 1/e~9780023001406
Human Factors Engineering, 1/e 9780023003707.htm Human Factors Engineering, 1/e~9780023003707
Electronics Dictionary for Technicians, The, 1/e 9780023008207.htm Electronics Dictionary for Technicians, The, 1/e~9780023008207
White Collar Crime in America, 1/e 9780023012617.htm White Collar Crime in America, 1/e~9780023012617
Masterpieces of the Drama, 6/e 9780023019753.htm Masterpieces of the Drama, 6/e~9780023019753
Psychological Testing, 7/e 9780023030857.htm Psychological Testing, 7/e~9780023030857
Language Skills in Elementary Education, 4/e 9780023031700.htm Language Skills in Elementary Education, 4/e~9780023031700

All products are assigned to a page.

"What is the Search Destination set to on Products > Edit Product info > Search Destination? (assuming you have a ShopSite Pro store)"
I did not see this option.

I have not added any keywords.

Thanks so much!

[Jim]

I searched for the word "guide" and the results page showed that there were 7 pages of results,based on the Prev Next links at the bottom of the page. But none of the results pages show anything. It looks like your templates are not outputting any product information.

What are the 3 template that are assigned on Preferences > Search Settings > Search layout in the Layout Info area, Search Template: ,
Link Template Override: ,
Product Template Override

Note that it is products that are indexed not pages. The only content on a page that will be indexed is what is in the product information on the page.

I don't understand the page upload info that you posted. From your Home page there is a link 9780020080954 which goes to a page http://palexbooks.com/store/9780020080954.htm . The title of that page is
"Elements of Business Writing: A Guide to Writing Clear, Concise Letters, Mem, 1/e" and it appears to have a product by the name of " Elements of Business Writing: A Guide to Writing Clear, Concise Letters, Mem, 1/e"
which is the same as the page name.
Looking at your product list and the page list it looks like they are all going to be the same format, Page name = name of product on the page? Is that all correct?

Note that searching is for exact words so if you search for "Element" it will not find "Elements" since they are not the same. To make it so it will search for partial words enable the *STEM* feature where the * represent the checkbox being checked. This allows the search for something before or after the search term entered. If STEM* is enabled then searching for "Element" will find "Elements" because if it doesn't find the word it will look for the word with something after it. Similarly if you have the *STEM option enabled and search for "physics" then "Metaphysics" will be found since the * indicates to look for something before the word. And if you have both the *STEM* enabled, when a person searches for "piece" they will find "Masterpieces" since it has "piece" in the middle.

Note that there is also a "Stop List" on the Preferences > Search Settings > Search Indexing screen that contains words that will not be indexed. You might want to check this list and make sure none of the words you expect to be searched for are in the list.

[palex]

Search Template - BasicSearch.sst
Link Template Override - BasicPage-Link.sst
Product Template Override - BasicProduct-Search.sst

Yes, currently I do have things configured so that Page name = name of product on the page, though this might change later. Also, the link 9780020080954 will eventually be removed/changed, but I'm not too concerned about that at the moment, as I want to get everything to a basic level of functionality first.

I actually did not get search results for either Element or Elements. Where is the STEM setting?

There are currently no words checked on the stop list, but the word that are included in the list of occurrences seem to be the list from my previous large feed (thousands of products) before I purged them and uploaded the smaller sample list.

Thanks again, Jim.

[Jim]

"Where is the STEM setting?"
Preferences > Search Settings > Search layout close to the bottom of the screen.

I'm not sure where the list of word occurrences is kept. Have you done a total publish (utilities > publish > regenerate) since you deleted and then uploaded again?

[palex]

I have

"Whole words with Auto new search with stems if nothing found"

selected, with both stem boxes checked. A search for "Element", "Elements", and "men" still produces no results. Are you still getting a similar issue? I am very stumped!

[Jim]

I searched for 'men' and the page the displays with what should be the search results
It looks something like.
================================

Code: Select all

Home > Search                Result pages: 21-40 of 227
Search Results for: men





      Advanced Search
Results per page:  Prev| Page: [1][2][3][4]  ... | Sort by
[20]                           12 |Next                       [Relevance ]

The search for "men" had 227 hits in your products. So search is working it is just not able to display the results.

So I ask again as I did on Aug 16th
What are the 3 template that are assigned on Preferences > Search Settings > Search layout in the Layout Info area,
Search Template: ,
Link Template [ ] Override: checkbox checked or not?
Product Template [ ] Override: checkbox checked or not?

If the checkboxes of the Override templates are checked please post the following:
[--DEFINE LINK_TO_PAGE--] section of the Link Template
[-- DEFINE SEARCH_RESULTS --] section of the Product Template.

[palex]

Thanks, Jim.
The three template settings are the same as before from my 8/20 post:

Search Template - BasicSearch.sst
Link Template Override - BasicPage-Link.sst
Product Template Override - BasicProduct-Search.sst

The Override check boxes are checked. Where can I find this information?:
[--DEFINE LINK_TO_PAGE--] section of the Link Template
[-- DEFINE SEARCH_RESULTS --] section of the Product Template

I guess the other issue is why the search indicates so many results when there are only nine products. Something is appearing to not have been purged.

Thanks again!

[Jim]

This was solved through emails outside of the forum. So others looking or searching the forum for solutions may benefit from the issue was resolved here is what was done.

A custom page template was created by making a copy of the BasicPage-Link.sst template which was used by the theme the store was using.
The page template only had the [-- DEFINE LINK_TO_PAGE --] as shown in the code below.

Code: Select all

[--DEFINE LINK_TO_PAGE--]
<a class="linkonly" href="[-- OUTPUT_DIRECTORY_URL --]/[-- PAGE.FileName --][-- SEARCHPRODUCTLINK --]">[-- IF PAGE.LinkName --][-- PAGE.LinkName --][-- ELSE --][-- PAGE.Name REMOVE_HTML --][-- END_IF --]</a>
[--END_DEFINE LINK_TO_PAGE--]

To separate the link so it did not appear to be part of the next product a horizontal rule was placed after the link and a paragraph break after that to give a little more space between the search results. So the final template looked like this.

Code: Select all

[--DEFINE LINK_TO_PAGE--]
<a class="linkonly" href="[-- OUTPUT_DIRECTORY_URL --]/[-- PAGE.FileName --][-- SEARCHPRODUCTLINK --]">[-- IF PAGE.LinkName --][-- PAGE.LinkName --][-- ELSE --][-- PAGE.Name REMOVE_HTML --][-- END_IF --]</a><hr><p>
[--END_DEFINE LINK_TO_PAGE--]

There may have been other ways that this could have been accomplished using styles, but this was simple and worked.