Loosen Search Query

[paulm]

If I remember correctly, all input spaces are first being used as word separators and then trimmed, and after that several other characters are converted to spaces and then ...... ?

Anyway, soundex might indeed help a bit (if the only language is English). I would certainly not call it a winner though. It's easy to beat the soundex results by some simple string replacements in PHP (even if the language is English), but for obvious reasons a php script can not be a real winner either....

[hem]

I've also checked RLIKE (REXEXP) and MATCH() AGAINST () but they are not going to do what you are looking for. My ideas would be:

1: str_replace the space character into '%'s and then tacking futher '%' each end of a TRIMed search and use this as the search in the MySQL query.

2: Explode the search into an array and then use a FOREACH to create a search of '`product_name` LIKE '%'.search_word.'%' and OR all the results together.

However this won't get over someone searching for 'redbilletgrillenissan' matching to 'billet grille'. But then I don't think it should- someone putting that much info into a search criteria is obviously trying to narrow down the search and probably won't be happy if the search returns every occurance of 'grille' it finds.

[hem]

The more I think about this the more I get the feeling that just setting Admin->My Store->Default Search Operator to 'OR' would probably be the best solution...