questions about advanced search

I have, what I think, is an interesting problem that I need help with.

I have set up several advanced searches on the home page to make searches a bit easier for the customer. The store contains several categories and the products (stamps) fall in two types; kiloware and special stamps. The search for kiloware items is easy, as all kiloware product are in one top level category, so I have a search by category with subcats included. However, the special stamps are divided among about 12 categories. The special stamps have certain keywords that I can use in the advanced search using the Boolean operator OR . The search is not too bad but still misses about 5% of the products. Not sure if the are characters in the product description fields that are somehow interfering with the search.

But the real question is this: Can I use the Boolean operator
NOT to be able to search for everything and NOT kiloware? I suppose this would mean that there would need to be a wildcard operator, such as "" , so that the search could be something like " and NOT kiloware" .

Hopefully my explanation and question are not too obtuse.

Thanks for any help on this.

Update: I know how to get EVERYTHING I just don't know how to negate those searches that have KILOWARE in the description. Any ideas?

Thanks for the help.

Probably a much simpler solution is the answer to my problem..
I just need to come up with a single 'unique' word that can be
applied to all product in the categories that I want found. Need
to apply that old adage, 'KISS' (Keep It Simple Stupid). Why make
it more difficult than it needs to be. Thanks to all that might have
given thoughts to this issue.

I am getting some very anomalous behavior from the advanced
search routines.

I put a KEYWORD in the v_products_description field to aid in
the search for a particular set of product. The search fails to
find over 100 of the products that have that keyword.

More peculiar is that I have my site set up on a local host and
have run the same search there. The results are different. In fact,
on the local host the search finds all but 6 of the the products
modified with the keyword.

Why would there be such a difference and why does the search
fail to find all the product modified with the keyword in
v_products_description? I really would appreciate some help from
the gurus. PLEASE !

JohnBoyCR,

I find Advanced Search far superior to setting up and linking lots of products in different categories, but it seems to have 2 forms.

(1) If you check the words "Advanced Search" it allows you to limit the search by various criteria including search by category.

(By the way, although in that advanced screen you can choose price as one of the delimiters, I learned from this forum you can also right click, I believe, on the price to sort by price, which seems a neat trick that is not obvious.)

The limitation to search within category should suffice to eliminate the items that contain the word Kiloware. I had the impression on testing that if you check "within description" it doesn't necessarily limit itself to the description. Maybe someone could confirm yea or nay on that.

(2) If you do not cleck on the words "Advanced Search" but just press return after entering search terms, I found that single search terms are not really successful. Far better results are obtained with two or three search terms used together.

As a result of the above discoveries, I have tried to provide search instructions by modifying the advanced search box, and changing the "advanced search" words to add "within category."

My presentation seems a bit awkward, though. At the present, my suggested search terms, in a font size 1, appear double-spaced. I believe the line spacing is relative to the font size of the title "Search." I hope to discover how to attain an appearance of single-spaced lines for the tiny search terms, which I suppose will involve figuring out how to code single spacing in html and insert it in the Search box.

My site is under development at http://www.riverfrontsouth.com should you wish to see an example.

Good luck.

Notageek