At 10:47 AM +0100 7/19/08, Richard Heyes wrote:
Hey,
I was hoping to get some ideas on improving a sites search.
Currently I have two - not a lot but I've been thinking about this
for a few minutes.
That'll leave a mark. :-)
Currently the site in question uses a very basic LIKE in MySQL, eg
%blah%, but naturally this finds terms such as hjkblahbjkk - which
is not desired. Or such matches should be ranked lower than
something that matches the exact word blah. My thoughts are using a
points system, eg assigning 5 points for an exact word match, 1 for
a partial match. And then ordering the search results by the total
points assigned.
I'm sure that would work, but just how many LIKE items do you want to
show the user? For me, I would rather not show them anything if there
is nothing on my site that matches their exact search criteria.
The point being, from my perspective, users don't spend a lot of time
reading results. They want answers quick and short. I would think
that if you provided them with a long list of "Did you mean this?"
results -- that might frustrate the user.
If I did that, then I would also highlight each LIKE search word to
show the user why the LIKE results were being presented to them.
Either that or using external search code and not worrying so much.
Considering all, using an external search would probably be better --
less time worrying about it and delivering good results to users
queries is not as simple as it seems. However, if someone could come
up with a better way, I am sure you could. But, the point is, would
it make a difference?
Cheers,
tedd
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