advanced search

[weirdorecords]

Apologies, I should've mentioned. I'm using 1.3.9f. So, if I understand you correctly, this is a known issue?

[Ajeh]

That depends ...

If you try to search for:
"seven"

Can you give an example of why you would search for:
"seven"

and not just:
seven


If you are searching for something like:
"test seven"

and cannot find it, then you need to check your upgrade to v1.3.9f as I cannot reproduce the problem ...

Can you give a specific search that you are trying to make that is not working?

[weirdorecords]

Sure. My issue stems from people trying to search for bands with short names. 2 examples would be the band 'Can' or the band 'AMM'. Currently on my site, if you do a search for these, even if you're not searching through the entire description, there are far too many results for the results to be useful.

I'm assuming people would try quotes in order to do a whole word search (much as one would on google). Thus, in the example of 'Can', knocking out results like 'american' or 'volcanic'.

I realize that one could also use the dropdown menu to just look under 'C artists', but I think that particular extra step is an untypical requirement, and so one that will ultimately reduce sales.

I suppose what I'd *really* like is for people to be able to use checkboxes to limit their search to particular fields (artist, title, etc), and then choose whether it's a whole word or keyword search. I did spend some time looking for this in zen cart forums, but mostly ran into dead ends.

Any of that helpful?

[Ajeh]

I think you would have to build a custom search to limit these searches and expand your advance search for other fields as needed ...

[weirdorecords]

Great, but one of the problems I will need to solve in order to cobble together the code for an entire custom search function, is how to make whole word searches for strings of 3 letters or less.

That's the problem. Zen Cart does not allow for exact keyword searches of less than 4 letters. Why on earth not?

[Ajeh]

Because then all people who search for 3 letters and want to find them when mixed in words would complain ...

You need to customize this for your shop if you need it otherwise ...

You can check if the length of the keyword is only 3 characters and if so then work out a different search method ...

I would suggest a checkbox of some sort as many will not want to just search for 3 letter exact matches and may want to see anything that contains the 3 letters ...

Look in the file:
/includes/pages/advanced_search_result/header_php.php

to see how the current search is done ...

[masterrusty]

An answer to this issue sure would be nice. Short word searches seem to place items that actually contain the short word at the end of the product list.