Tuning the search - "auto-quotes"

[jxm28788]

Hi,

I'm getting a problem where I have a lot of products and I'm getting too many irrelevent search results.

One of the main problems seems to be if the user types in something with a dash (which will happen a lot) it seems to interpret this as two strings to be AND'd.

eg. AB-1000 is interpreted as AB AND 1000 (or possibly AB AND NOT 1000...)

to get the correct result the user has to type "AB-1000" (ie. in quotes), but I don't want a list of instructions in the search box I just want it to work...

So is there anyway of enclosing all search words in quotes automatically?

[TraceyG]

Hi John,

Have you added the 'dash' character to the list of valid search characters (View | Search Settings)?

[jxm28788]

I have now! I'll just wait for it to upload (yawn) and see if that fixes it...

[jxm28788]

next question... is there a minimum length for search terms? eg. if someone types in a 2 character string does the search just decide that it is 'too short, therefore too common, therefore ignore it'? (in the way that many search engines do).