Regarding Concrete5's Search
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Hi all!
So there's something I've been curious about for a while now. I've been looking into Concrete5's searching capability, and am very hopeful for the ability to refine searches, filter searches, sort, etc, all through the use of both default page attributes, and custom attributes, just as a start.
The place where it seems like search is lacking, is in the text portion of search. From what I understand, it is very basic. I guess my question is, are there any plans to further refine Concrete5's search capability in future updates, or has someone already developed an add-on for such a purpose, or is it relatively easy to implement advanced searching algorithms, such as fuzzy logic?
Our site has over 8500 pages, so we are trying to find the most efficient way to allow powerful searching, using tagging, custom attributes, and parent page (just as a start) to further filter search results.
So far, we have been using DuckDuckGo as a search tool on our site, which has been returning accurate results for searches, with the most relevant at the top. The main downfall is we lose the ability to implement filtering via custom attributes, and any other options, because the search results are returned on DuckDuckGo. Is it possible to get Concrete5's text search to work similarly to this, at least for text searching?
Thanks!
So there's something I've been curious about for a while now. I've been looking into Concrete5's searching capability, and am very hopeful for the ability to refine searches, filter searches, sort, etc, all through the use of both default page attributes, and custom attributes, just as a start.
The place where it seems like search is lacking, is in the text portion of search. From what I understand, it is very basic. I guess my question is, are there any plans to further refine Concrete5's search capability in future updates, or has someone already developed an add-on for such a purpose, or is it relatively easy to implement advanced searching algorithms, such as fuzzy logic?
Our site has over 8500 pages, so we are trying to find the most efficient way to allow powerful searching, using tagging, custom attributes, and parent page (just as a start) to further filter search results.
So far, we have been using DuckDuckGo as a search tool on our site, which has been returning accurate results for searches, with the most relevant at the top. The main downfall is we lose the ability to implement filtering via custom attributes, and any other options, because the search results are returned on DuckDuckGo. Is it possible to get Concrete5's text search to work similarly to this, at least for text searching?
Thanks!
So out of curiosity, does something like this already exist as an add-on? I don't have a lot of knowledge about database specific things, particularly when it comes to search, such as indexing, best practices, etc.
Thanks for the response though, makes me hopeful that we can make it a powerful search tool.
Thanks for the response though, makes me hopeful that we can make it a powerful search tool.
I've actually got most of that working (in terms of allowing boolean queries against the c5-generated search index), by forking an oldish core search block. I was going to release it as a free add-on.
Unfortunately, the core has changed a lot since I forked so a lot of work would be required to realign it. I've also moved away from c5 development so I'm not sure when I'll get to finishing it.
An open question is how to index (and hence search) content generated by express entities. At the moment, the core doesn't index them, meaning that searches can't find them. This will be a bad look on sites for which express content is fundamental.
Unfortunately, the core has changed a lot since I forked so a lot of work would be required to realign it. I've also moved away from c5 development so I'm not sure when I'll get to finishing it.
An open question is how to index (and hence search) content generated by express entities. At the moment, the core doesn't index them, meaning that searches can't find them. This will be a bad look on sites for which express content is fundamental.
The core actually has pretty much you would need for a more powerful search engine.
What the core offers are the tools to search page content and attributes and filter results based on this.
What would need to be implemented is the search query parsing for things like AND OR quotation marks indicating exact expressions etc... And then we would have to use the results of that parsing and build the database search query using the tools available in the core.