Post by nodric » Mon Jan 09, 2012 11:49 pm

There seems to be no way to refine search using categories. i.e. You search a term and you are then stuck staring at 100s of parts with no further way to refine the list to narrow your search.

e.g. In my store (link in signature) if I search for 'AFR' I get back all the cylinder heads for AFR, but I can't then refine them by any other criteria. If I navigate using categories of course this is easy.

It would be great if the categories that these search results belong to also appeared so the customer could then start navigating through them to refine the results.

Is there a way to tackle this, or a VQMod out there?

Thanks
Last edited by nodric on Tue Jan 10, 2012 10:37 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Post by d7a7z7e7d » Tue Jan 10, 2012 2:05 pm

On the search results page there is a category dropdown where you can refine the results. Also, I do have a search extension you might be interested in: http://opencartworld.com/improved-search

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Post by nodric » Tue Jan 10, 2012 10:36 pm

I did look again at the Category drop down to further refine/search within. However, this is not enough as it only filters down one level further. I updated the post title to reflect this ;)

This is what a typical category navigation looks like. Some may even have more levels depending on the options to select the right product. Maybe I'm pushing OC to far in selling parts that have a lot of criteria to find the right one? :-[

Image

When I search for the same type of item the only options I get on the search page are:

Image

The 'Stroker Kits' and 'Chevy or Ford' options are the furthest this method will take me. At this level of search there are still 50 options, and once we have loaded all of them, there will be over 300! This is far from user friendly as a search.

On other sites once you have searched and got x100s of results, you can then apply filters to further refine the results.

Amazon is a good example. You use the left pane to further filter your hits. Our competitors also have this ability!

I'd like to be able to use the categories as this type of advanced filtering, unless someone else has a better way, or a Mod already out there.

What I'd like to try and avoid is entering the information twice. i.e. As category names, and then again as filters in a mod, but I'd accept that if it achieved what I was looking for.

N

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Post by nodric » Wed Jan 11, 2012 1:44 am

d7a7z7e7d wrote:I see. Here are a couple other mods that do what you are looking for:

http://spotonsolutions.net/layered-navigation-1_5

http://www.opencart.com/index.php?route ... on_id=2690
I really appreciate the links!

It seems that this is a complex problem, and that the solution in the second link is problematic at best to get successfully working. I also try and steer clear of hacking the core code as mush as I can, as this only makes upgrading harder and fraught, even though I keep detailed change logs etc.

I do think this is a great feature request, but one mans feature is another's waste of time.

The Spot On vehicle make filter seems to be very usable, as it seems to allow a lot of flexibility and is product specific, so we can set options on a product by product basis. If this is the case, then that would give me a great deal of usability. Going to email the author.

Thanks again

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