search terms

Hello~

I'm having a problem with how the search is pulling results. Here's the specific situation:

We are selling plumbing fittings. They're push-fit, which means the tubing pushes into the fitting and little metal teeth hold it in place. The word 'teeth' is included in our search terms for every fitting by this particular manufacturer.

If the customer types 'tee' as a search term, it's pulling every fitting because the word 'teeth' is listed and it's pulling the 'tee' from 'tee'th.

How can we eliminate this from happening?

Thanks so much!

there are 4 search criteria:

Equal
Begins With
Ends With
Includes


it sounds like you are using the includes search criteria

if you want to still be able to search for "teeth" in the middle of a string, but also search for "tee" in the middle of the string, the only way to work around the problem is to add a space in the search term:
"tee "

Hmmm... all our search terms are separated with spaces. There aren't any commas, quotations, or other punctuation.

I just changed the criteria to 'equal' and no results appear, I'm assuming because they'd have to type the exact terms as we have them in the metaKeyword field.

So if I have the search criteria as 'includes' and all the terms are separated by spaces, what else can I do?

use includes and use a space in the search term

if you want to search for "tee" but not return "teeth" search for "tee ". that way it is looking for the word tee followed by a space.

That still doesn't work, unless I'm misunderstanding. I have 'includes' set as the comparison, but even if I type 'tee ' with a space into the search field, it still returns all the products that include the work 'teeth' in the keywords. Also, I wouldn't want it set as a requirement for our visitors to have to type spaces after their final search term since that's not a common practice.

Am I doing something incorrectly?

well, its not possible to to restrict teeth from an includes search for tee without adding some way to the search term to tell it to look for the word boundary.

the includes search does not work on word boundaries, that is not the way SQL searches work unless you add the boundry to the search term.

how is the search configured? is it a key word search? what is used for the OR separator? is the or separator a space? that would explain why adding the space to the search is not working. is trying to add an or comparison.

It's a keyword search with a space as the 'and' separator and a comma as the 'or' separator. Should I change something?

so try using quotes around the search term and include the space at the end:
"tee "

That didn't return any results.

Here's a link to the search page:
products_search.php