Hi -
This has had me scratching my head for a while.
When I use the advanced search on my website and limit the search to just 'Product name', 75% of the results do NOT contain the search word in the product name!
I have now located the cause of the problem and wondered if anyone might have a solution.
The problem is in the product data - under the SEO / Meta data there is a box for 'Search words:', which as far as I can tell helps the website searches (rather than Google etc).
We have duplicated the Meta keywords into this search to 'help' the internal search.
However this data seems to be included in the Advanced Product Name search so we get pages of invalid results – however if we remove the search word data, the Advanced Search>Product name works perfectly!
I assumed it was a problem with my site - but I logged onto the CS-Cart demo website and added the word FISHPASTE to the title of one product, and into the 'search words' of another product ---- and I get the same faulty search results. ie If I do an Advanced search and limit it to Product Name for the word FISHPASTE I get 2 results - only one of which has the word in the title.
I'm pleased I found the cause of the bug - but the only solution seems to be removing the 'Search word' data – will this have an impact on search speeds or anything else? or the 'quality' of search results?
I did contact CS-Cart support initially and they are going to investigate - I will inform them of my findings, and maybe will have a fix?
thanks
Thank you for the clarification, Fishpaste.
This behaviour is not a bug and everything works as it was intended. Please let me explain how the “Search words” functionality works in CS-Cart by default:
The “Search words” input field is used for entering a list of words by which a product can be found only in the built-in search facility. In other words, if you want some product to be found by a specific word(s), that is missing in its name and description, enter it into the “Search words” field and this product will be displayed in the search results if the entered word(s) match.
No matter, if a visitor selects only the “Product name” check box on the Advanced search page, the words entered into the search input field will always be looked for in the values of “Search words” fields of all products too.
Example: Imagine, I have a store that sells cell phones and accessories. I have an accessory that suits all the modern phones (say, an USB cable). In this case, I will give this accessory the name “An USB cable”, its description will be “Suits most of the modern cell phones” and I will enter all known mobile phone brands into the “Search words” field for this product (of course, you can list all the brands in the accessory description, but it will not look good), so that when a visitor enters 'Nokia', 'Blackberry', etc into the search input field at the storefront, he will get this universal cable among the other items in the search results.
As for the META tags - they are not used in the internal search and not connected with the “Search words” functionality in any way. The values of the “META description” and “META keywords” fields are included in the appropriate HTML tags in the HTML source code of the product page that are read by search engineers (crawlers).
I hope it clarifies everything.
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Anastasiya Kozlova
CS-Cart Support Team
When adding a search word to “search words” they do not show the product with this search word in the quick show list drop down. If I press enter then it does show the product. Is this how it is to work or should they show in the quick search drop down list too.
John
Hello John,
Thank you for your message.
Please let me explain how it works. When the “Quick search” add-on is enabled in the administration panel and a customers enters some search words into the text input field of the quick search section on the storefront, a drop-down list with search results appears automatically (if any products are found with regard to the entered search words). However if this add-on is disabled, no drop-down list with search results is appeared automatically when entering some search words. In this case you should click the “Search” button to see a page with search results.
I hope it answers your question.
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Pavel Zyukin
CS-Cart Support team