Search Issues

[knucklehead]

Two problems:

My search indexes only the SKUs and Names of products.

1. I have a product titled "1 on 1" but when you search for it, it brings up 5 pages of results and it is tucked in the middle of the 3rd page. Why can;t the search engine be more intelligent? Why wouldn't a product with that string in them be at the top of the listings.

2. I have a product titled "The Performance Management Cycle". When I do a search for that exact title I get ZERO results. But when I remove the word "The" from the search and just search on "Performance Management Cycle", it finds the product?? Here is a link to my search page:

http://128.121.125.171/

[Jim]

The search in ShopSite is a word search not a phrase search. It will only index and display individual words not phrases. So in all likelihood 1 on 1 will not be indexed at all since individual numbers are not usually indexed (you have to enable indexing numbers, it is not on by default) and 'on' is probably in the list of words not to index (stoplist) . "The" is another word that is not indexed so if you search for it it will not be found.

What version of ShopSite are you using? There were some changes made to search in some of the later versions that will ignore search terms if they were not indexed but some older versions would not ignore them.

[beley]

Are there any plans to integrate phrases into the search? Allowing search by phrases using quotation marks and maybe even requiring terms using plus sign or excluding using minus would be really useful features.

[knucklehead]

Thanks for response...

Phrase search should be essential. How many products are titled with a single word? In any industry?

Also, this does nto explain why "The Performance Management Cycle" does not give any results but "Performance Management Cycle" does.

I did not use any quotations in the actual search.

[knucklehead]

Please read my reply above and add this to it...

I have a product titled: "It's Up To You -Employee Version"

Can someone from ShopSite supprt tell me how a customer is supposed to find it using the ShopSite search? I cannot get a result with any of the keywords in the title.

http://128.121.125.171/

[Jeff]

Most of our shoppers navigate by drilling down thru links, rather than by using our search form. No doubt many visitors realize that such forms rarely work well. Some forms don't work at all. (tried the search utility at a university yesterday and kept getting an error message, for example). You can improve the functionality of SS's search by tweaking keywords and stopwords.

The great majority of our smaller competitors don't even offer a text product search.

Its better to make links or drop down forms your main search method if you have a small number of products.

[knucklehead]

Are you from Shopsite?

To say that its ok for a feature not to function for the purpose for which it is built is not a good response; even if competitors dont have the feature.

The search feature was a MAJOR feature to me when I was selecting cart software. To now say...well it's just there for looks does not jive.

There are products on my site (and in the shipsite database) titled:

The Performance Management Cycle
and
Customer Service Toolkit

lets say a customer was browsing my website using your the other navigation that we have provided on the site (as you recommend). Then they come back the next day to purchase it.

They forget what part of the site they orignally saw the product, so they use the handy dandy search tool we have up there for them.

NO RESULTS for either product. (Do the search yourself you'll see).

The customer KNOWS the product is on the site, yet a search does not find it.

So she gets frustrated and goes out to Google it; where she'll find five other verndors for it and I've just lost a sale.

I need to know from Shopsite if you plan on fixing this? or should I shop for other shopping carts?

[Jeff]

I'm not from Shopsite. But I'm a happy user. (and I have experience with other --far inferior --hosted carts)

No question SS search is limited, but I've tested many sites using other carts. Go to small sporting goods sites and look up "baseball". "baseballs." "base ball" and "base balls." Maybe one of the four will work reasonably well. You won't find reasonably priced carts having Google-like phrase search capability, as far as I can tell.

My point is that you should stress drill-down means of getting the visitor to the product. For many sites that's a better route in any event.

One last comment: SS excels at improving their product, They listen and they upgrade regularly.

[lbohen]

We have over 11,000 products at our ShopSite Pro store and a relevant search feature is extremely important to our visitors.

Because the ShopSite search feature doesn't search for phrases and doesn't prioritize results in relevancy order, we had our host, www.lexiconn.com, replace the ShopSite search with a Swish search feature. Swish is a separate program and returns very relevant results.

[knucklehead]

Thanks for that info.

Does it permit you to control the way search results appear? Woudl it solve the following problem?

I have a product titled "1 on 1" but when you search for it, it brings up 5 pages of results and it is tucked in the middle of the 3rd page. Why can;t the search engine be more intelligent? Why wouldn't a product with that string in them be at the top of the listings.

[lbohen]

I'm not sure about the "1 on 1" phrase. Email support@lexiconn.com and ask them.