Subcatagories Not Found with Search Tool

Hi Folks,

Just discovered a weird issue with the search tool. Let me try and describe it.

I create catagories on my site for each product, a camera for example. Lots of products work for that camera. Example: Sony-CCD-TRV58

This is the exact name of a subcatagory (3rd level) on my site. There are three (linked) products that live in that catagory.

If I search that exact catagory, I get the awful, "no products found" message. That is because I haven't used that exact configuration (stupidly perhaps) in the product description. (In the product description, there are variations of "Sony CCD TRV58 or CCD-TRV58 or CCDTRV58)

A search of TRV58 or most of the variations will pull the product fine, so in terms of customer functionality, this is perhaps not the most important issue.

I should note though, that in the admin search tool inside the catagories products area of the zen admin panel, if I run the same search, for "Sony-CCD-TRV58", the subcatagory pops up exactly as I would expect. Click on it and I can see the three linked products that live there.

Has anyone else faced this issue? How it affects me is mostly on my testing for catagories following an easy populate. I can run my tests in other ways, but it does seem extremely unusual to me that the the catagories would not show up in the search.

Note that this subcatagory was created manually, not with easy populate, so no problems there.

Any ideas? :lamo:

In the Admin ... the search says:

1 search the categories

2 search the products

3 display the combined results ...

In the Catalog ... the search says:

1 search the products via the Sideboxes ...

2 -- OR -- do a more verbose search of the Products via the Advanced search

NOTE: the word Category never is heard in the Catalog ... :eek:

So ... you could get creative ... add those to your keywords or get more verbose with your descriptions as it only feeds a hungry spider ... :smartalec: