No Search Results?

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I have a site with quite a few pages (not all with content), and yet the C5 search feature seems to hardly ever return any results.

I have checked the forum and read a bunch of posts about searches not working but I believe my case is different.

I know that C5 only indexes "Main" and "Main Content"; my actual content is in "Main" so that isn't the issue.

I have my search form post to another (custom) page - which I have created... the search form posts correctly and I have a Search block put in the Main area of my custom results page (and I always double check with the search block form just in case my custom form doesn't work).

I have also made sure to re-index the site pages, and I have also confirmed that the database table PageSearchIndex has data in it (and that the entries contain data in the "content" column, which the ones with content appear to). I have even tried truncating that table, and re-running the index job to ensure all the data there is correct.

If I search for a very common word on the site, I get no results - but if I search for the word "detail", it seems to pull results. It also looks like the search is case sensitive?

Why is the search feature so buggy? Something is obviously not functioning correctly and I really need this to work!

 
ThemeGuru replied on at Permalink Reply
ThemeGuru
The search block is sometimes a pain.

However there is a newer paid version tied in with some cool stuff.

Here it is:http://www.concrete5.org/marketplace/addons/search-tools/...

Hope that helps,

Thomas
esand replied on at Permalink Reply
Interesting, I'll check that out, but I tend to shy away from paid options.

I've done some debugging, and I've come down to it apparently seeming like the problem with the search feature is not any of the code, but limitations of MySQL's fulltext search features.

If I run the actual command C5 uses to do its search on my MySQL server, I am getting the same results as C5 is giving me. Perhaps using fulltext queries is not a good option? I did see one thing in the MySQL docs saying that any word that appears in more than 50% of the results is ignored... which means if you search for a very common word, it will ignore it!?
esand replied on at Permalink Reply
... and of course just after I figure it's probably MySQL related and I "fix" the search query so that it should work, code apparently seems to not even get executed. Something is *VERY* fishy with the search block controller.
ThemeGuru replied on at Permalink Reply
ThemeGuru
It does need some improvements. Hopefully it will get fixed one day.

The search tools isn't that bad but as your going the free way check out some good options maybe there is something there.

Cheers,

Thomas
esand replied on at Permalink Reply
I would absolutely love it if someone could explain to me why var_dump() wouldn't be producing any output when it's put in (practically every spot) the executeBase() function from the DatabaseItemList() class whenever I do a search?

As far as I understand, in order for the search block to perform a search it has to create a PageList() instance (which inherits from DatabaseItemList()). If it wants to perform it's query, it should be calling the executeBase() function, correct?