Front End Site Search Not Adequately Defined?

Happy New Year everyone.

We are currently testing our new v4.15.2 cart with around 120 product listings prior to transitioning from an older version of CS cart. When I test the front end site search it seems to be poorly defined and renders results that a customer would find to be frustrating.

I would have expected that there was some some form of hierarchy in terms of search result priority e.g. I would think that most people would expect that a search word match in the product title or in the products “search words” field would rank higher than a match in the body of the product listing but this does not seem to be the case.

In settings I have “Search also in: pages” UNTICKED!

For example I have one a product listing with a title that begins with “Single …”, and various other product listings that have a random word “single” in the body of the description, yet if I do a site search for the word “single” the listing with that word actually in the beginning of the name and in its search keywords ranks about 80 in the search results behind those products that do not have the word in their title or their search keywords and the word just appears randomly in the body of the product description somewhere.

If I refine the search words by adding the second word of the product title the results are no better if the second word is in the body of other listings they rank higher in search results than the product that actually has the first two words in the listing title and in its keywords.

It seems as if site search just looks for the word basically anywhere (which defeats the purpose of search keywords) and then ranks the results alphabetically regardless of the match quality of the results.

Compare this to the quality of results with admin panel product search and its chalk and cheese, an admin panel product search with the same words returns precise results with a single result yet a front end site search with the same words and dozens of results are returned with the best match buried on page 6 of the search results (what customer would wade through 6 pages of results to find their product?).

Not sure how to fix this as at present the front end site search seems to have little value a google site specific search would probably return better quality results.

Any thoughts?

Hello.

Default search engine has not any rankings and uses simple search engine in database (and many other search addons too).

If you like to have better results please have a look our solution based on Elastic search engine.

Unfortunately, default search does not support relevance or ranking. So search marketplace for 3rd party solutions

Thanks for the replies, it seems to me that including “full description” within the results without any relevance or ranking is what produces the lower quality search results it would be better to exclude the full description as is the case with a default admin panel product search so that search can target title and search keywords.

app/schemas/search/schema.php

try to replace

'pfull' => 'Y',

with

'pfull' => 'N',

Then clear cache. Not tested

Thanks for the suggestion, gave it a try but did not seem to make a difference to search results.

I am currently looking at;
app/functions/fn.search.php

Do not forget to clear cache or delete the var/cache directory manually

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