[MOD]More powerful searching, OC 1.4.4

I think it's really important to include a sort of wildcards system when the user gives two o more keywords...

I have downloaded version 1.4.6, and the file is corrupt?

Is there anyway some one can post the code into the forum here?

Also, has anyone done a search mod for 1.4.7?

I am also finding that this zip file is corrupt.
It has some folder in it called MacOS so maybe it is a mac/windows compatibility issue?
I will try and open it on a mac box tonight to see if I get anywhere with that.

Otherwise if anyone has done this to an opencart 1.4.6 install and got it working can they post the code here.

I tried to open the zip file on a mac and it was still corrupt.
So if the uploader still has the code, or if anyone has 'fixed' the search on their 1.4.6 site can they upload it.
Cheers!

Does anyone know if this works with 1.4.8?

I've made a version that works with 1.4.8. Might not be as good as the original, but definitely an improvement on the standard search.

Nice of you to share spikeachu.
Can I ask, does your enhanced search use AND for the search terms or does it use OR?
i.e do all terms have to be present or just any of the terms?

900pixels wrote:Nice of you to share spikeachu.
Can I ask, does your enhanced search use AND for the search terms or does it use OR?
i.e do all terms have to be present or just any of the terms?

It uses AND, so all terms have to be present.

You can easily change the ANDs to ORs in the model file, but for my purposes, that returns too many results.

I would think that OR's would be counter intuitive for pretty much everyone. If someone adds a word to their search they are generally trying to narrow the search not expand it.

I agree that OR can often provide too many results but I think this is better than zero results.
I think without a provision for synonyms, using AND often gets zero results.
For example:
People who spell one word incorrectly get no results.
People who may use a generic term for one of your products get no results.
People who include just one term that is not in your desctription get no results.
People who put an 's' at the end of a term get no results.

Of course you can try and make provisions for all of these errors by including synonyms, plurals, generic terms, simple words like the,at,or,and etc in the product tags but this is really labour intensive.

I also think having many search results would not be a bad thing if those that matched the most terms were listed first, but I don't think there is any sorting of this sort in Opencart's search results, which actually really cripples the effectiveness of using OR search operators.

It is a big problem that has many different solutions, but unfortunately a good search engine with features such as synonyms, keyword and page ranking, ignored terms, in itself is a very complex bit of code and not really something we can expect the opencart developers to devote a years work to doing.

Edit: added paragraph re: sorting results

Does it work with 1.4.9.3?