How can the search be smarter?

[weilies]

greeting!

do someone here know how to make phpld search smarter? i try "credit card", but it return whatever article relate to card "sim card", "ecards, id cards",

i know it's a bit smart which it can detect the last "s" with the search keyword "credit card", but the most worst thing is .... it return lots of unrelated category and article. :o

Is there any solution?

Thanks

[bruleo]

I totally agree. I know this has been asked before and I feel that the existing search function is very weak, I would like to see a few enhancements relating to functionality.

For example:-

1) Completely ignore searches of 3 characters or less. At the moment it display everything in the database! :eek:

2) Search by Description, Keywords or URL

3) If a user enters "Credit Cards" (for example), it only returns results relating to 'Credit Cards' and not 'cards', edit, credit etc.

Bruce.

[David]

At the moment this would be considered a mod request.

Version 3 does have some additional options for searching, but even it could be improved, and I'll be working on developing the best approach.

[Goodings Media]

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hiya,

Id suggest weighting the search results as well (like most SE scripts do)

i.e. a match in the title tag 1.0
match in description 0.5
match in meta tags 0.2

then each result gets a 'relevance' score. This would be handy for very large directories.

Theres an project atm called Astanda, which is free but the code ships as encrypted I think.... anyways might be worth spying over and taking a few tips :) It was the strongest alternative to PHPLD that I was looking at.... but their development has been taking for ages because the main guy just does it when he can.