Search anomaly

[Mox]

Hi everyone,

Wondered if anyone had a solution to this:

If you put a search into our site for a bike model such as "YZ250" nothing comes up; yet if you search on "YZ 250" you get all the results.

I realise this is because throughout our site we have listed it as "YZ 250"; however our customers may well search without the space and then they get "no matches were found".

This is the same for all of our bike models, so is a bit of a nuisance really.

Anyone have any ideas?

Many thanks in advance

Michelle
http://www.dirtbikestore.com

[jont]

As spaces are not searchable it is seeing the entry as 2 words. Some clever programmer may know a perl hack if it is controlled by a perl script.. hopefully someone like Kermy or Norman will advise on this.

The lazy hack is to add the product name without the space into the product description

[Mox]

Yes...that's what I thought - trouble is we have over a thousand line items, so the "lazy hack" is sadly not very attractive, hence I was hoping someone might have a whizzy solution!

[Bruce]

Michelle,

This is perhaps a simpler version of the lazy hack, but here goes. If you open the database, ActinicCatalog.mdb and then open the product table, you could copy the contents of the 'Short Description' column to an excell sheet, make the changes there and then repaste back into the table.

Kind regards,

[completerookie]

it could be easier than that

if you've not got Business then you can put !!<<noscript>>!!Hidden Custom Keywords!!<</noscript>>!! into the description of your special products (the text won't be displayed but will be searchable).

Now you could cook up a specific search that looks only for those hidden keywords.

so you could put the model number WITHOUT the space as a hidden keyword, then it will be found but the actual model number WITH a space will be displayed within the found items

kev

[Duncan Rounding]

...certainly a solution, but not one the search engines will like!