Search just by short description

[jonsurf]

Hi

Does anyone know of a way to set the Actinic search function to just look at what's in the short description field? I don't want it to take into account the full description or component products as it causes it to produce irrelevant results.

Many thanks

Jon

[AndyBorrett]

Try looking at the indexing options under Settings | Search Settings

[jonsurf]

Thanks. I've looked there but there's no option to index just by short description or to turn indexing of the full description off

[AndyBorrett]

My guess would be that a script change would be needed as I haven't come accross any variables to stop certain parts being indexed

[leehack]

If the text is useless, just remove it .

[AndyBorrett]

If the text in the full description is completely different to the short description you could always add it to 'not indexed' section in Search Settings

[NormanRouxel]

Some suggestions:

1) Move your Product Description into the Extended Info Text field and leave the Product Description empty. Disable indexing of the Extended Info text in search settings.

Change the Product layout(s) to replace

<actinic:variable name="ProductDescription" />

with

<Actinic:Variable Name="ExtendedInfoText"/>

2) As above but use a home-brewed Variable for the Description and replace <actinic:variable name="ProductDescription" /> with it.

[jonsurf]

Thanks for your suggestions.

I've got hundreds of products on the website though - using short description for the product name, full description for a longer description of the product and extended information for all the information including specs, instructions, etc.

Full description sometimes includes information about related products, which needs to be in there but shouldn't be indexed by the Actinic search. Also I upsell related products (as components), which are also indexed by the search but shouldn't be.

It's not practical to change this - it's what works best for the products in our store. I just wanted to be able to change the search settings or the search algorithm so that it just indexes the short description. Does anyone have any ideas how to do this?

Cheers

[Duncan Rounding]

Sounds like you will need some perl mods to do what you want.

[graphicz]

Search only short descriptions

Has anyone come up with a solution to this? ie a modification to the perl script to only search for search terms within short descriptions and not full descriptions?

[NormanRouxel]

I don't think it can be done by Perl tweaking. The list of search terms for each product is created by Catalog.exe when building the site and we've no control over that other than what the UI lets us do.

All I can think of is to move your Product Description to a user variable and leave the standard one empty. Possibly do-able by Exporting the Catalog, swopping the Description and User Variable names in the header record of the export file and re-importing.