Needed: More robust search on website

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We recently launched our first website using Concrete5. However, the C5 core search function is lacking in what we need.

For example: We have a product called "RX Rotary Union" but when a user searches for "RX Union" nothing comes up in the search results. We need the results to show parts of a phrase and not just exact matches.

We were using Google Mini on our previous site but since Google is no longer supporting that it's not an option anymore.

We are looking for someone to give us a more robust search option whatever that may be. If the core search function cannot be modified to show more results than we are open to a third party solution like Google Enterprise or another.

It would be helpful if we could see an example of the new solution implemented on another site.

Thank you.

 
optisol replied on at Permalink Reply
optisol
Hi,

We are interested. please share your details to info@optisolbusiness.com

Regards,
Optisol
Mainio replied on at Permalink Reply
Mainio
The core "search engine" is really basic level, not much of a search engine at all. It is capable of what the MySQL database's own "LIKE" comparison function can do and that is not much.

The most you could take out of the core search is changing it to work through MySQL’s own “MATCH AGAINS” comparison that can be evaluated against normal full text search indexed search columns. concrete5’s page search index table has those kinds of columns. That would probably allow some kind of improvement to the current situation. With quick testing this might do just what you’re looking for, at least for the example case provided in the description. The drawback would be that you would lose e.g. matches to partial words, i.e. “softwar” would not find content that has the word “software” in it.

If that’s not robust enough, there are also open source search engines available such as Apache Solr. These are configurable and provide a lot of options for implementing the search but the problem is that concrete5 does not currently have any kind of programming API to implement external search engines (like e.g. drupal does). Therefore, integrating such system into concrete5 would be somewhat complex as it would probably require some level of core overriding. But the major benefit would be that you would get just the kind of search on your site that you want to have.

We are up to the challenge and available for this job. If you want more details, please PM me or post your email here so that I can contact you directly. Or you can also contact us directly at info(at)mainiotech.fi

For more information on the MySQL search functions (and what they are capable of):
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/fulltext-search.html...

For more information on Apache Solr, please see:
http://lucene.apache.org/solr/

Here’s something Solr can do:
http://www.solrtutorial.com/solr-query-syntax.html...
https://wiki.apache.org/solr/LanguageDetection...


Best regards,
Antti Hukkanen
Mainio Tech Ltd.