Search spelling

[rmladden]

I have turned on recording for searches and what amazes me is that almost half of the searches have misspelled words. No wonder people cannot find anything. Examples:
dinosour
sun screen testin gkit
adom model
home made roboat
sience fair project
ovine fsh kit
fun thing to ake
soared powered item

I also changed the search default from all words to any word. People are entering combinations that will never be found. I also had to add some common words on my site to the stop list.

[Infolink]

start including common ones in your page tags - you might be surprised at the extra hits! (and at some peoples spelling)

Phil

[jacy]

I also changed the search default from all words to any word. People are entering combinations that will never be found. I also had to add some common words on my site to the stop list.
Hi Bob how did you do that? Is that a feature of business? have catalog.

Cheers,

Jacy

[rmladden]

In the template mamanger go to search. In the simple search template, change
<input TYPE=HIDDEN NAME="TB" VALUE="A">
to
<input TYPE=HIDDEN NAME="TB" VALUE="O">

In the regular search template, you can move CHECKED to the other TB radio button.

Also see my post on spelling at http://community.actinic.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=3974&highlight=plurals

[chrisbrown]

I wonder if the soundex algorithm could help with the misspelling and plural problems? I found this link (http://nl.php.net/soundex) to an interesting PHP thread.

[rmladden]

Very interesting. I have PHP on my server. It will take my a long time to explore this.

I should add that if you change the default search from all to any, you should record the searches (see the AUG). You may have to add words to the stop list to keep the search results reasonable.

[Infolink]

I suspect going that route would be a darn sight harder than just adding the common miss-spellings to the search lookup.

I briefly looked at some of that functionality a couple of years ago in PHP and it was just too
a.) hard to write
b.) server intensive
to be worth the effort.

There are some spell check addon bits now for PHP, if you really wanted customers to get exactly the right thing you could scan the search string against the word library plus what ever custom words used on the site and present them with a drop down containing correct spellings or a "did you mean" text line like google does. That would be way easier to implement.
There would be a need to recompile PHP with the new functions to do this though, so if you are not on your own server it could be a problem!

Phil

[rmladden]

I think the easiest solution may be just to show what the user entered on the search results, so he can see how bad a typist he is. Then he'll try again.

[Infolink]

Depends if he / she is on AOL:) :)
Going by some of the lists I'm on illiteracy is a condition of membership!

Phil

[00lewis]

In the regular search template, you can move CHECKED to the other TB radio button.

Hi there i have managed to do the first bit but am a bit unsure of this bit?
move checked to the other TB radio button???

can anyone help clear this ?

[cdicken]

Look for the following code in Act_SearchTemplate.html(v7)/Search Page Bulk Area(v8)

<Actinic:Variable Name="SearchCombine"/>
<input type="radio" name="TB" checked="checked" value="A" />
<Actinic:Variable Name="SearchAndPrompt"/>
<input type="radio" name="TB" value="O" />Move the checked="checked" from the first input tag to the second input tag.