I’ve run into needing these a few times and seen a few in forum posts, so thought I’d put them into one request:

1.  Add an ‘and’ option when searching multiple categories- right now, if you select two categories, it pulls any entries found in either category.  Would be nice if you could limit it by parameter to pull only entries found in both categories.
2.  In addition to a keywords tag that shows the keywords searched for, would be nice to also have tags for weblog(s) and category(s) searched.
3.  Ability to search in only specified custom fields- the finer grain the control on this one, the nicer it would be (though it gives me a headache thinking how to set it up);
4.  Ability to accept searches with no keywords- this is handy if you have a filter like this- where they can select multiple categories and a keyword- but if no keyword is selected, it returns all entries in the selected cats.
5.  Add to the search_in parameter so you can search in the category fields/title- particularly handy now that we’ve got custom fields in categories.

And that would be my search module wish list!

Robin Sowell - 26 September 2007 09:30 AM

I’ve run into needing these a few times and seen a few in forum posts, so thought I’d put them into one request:
1.  Add an ‘and’ option when searching multiple categories- right now, if you select two categories, it pulls any entries found in either category.  Would be nice if you could limit it by parameter to pull only entries found in both categories.

I second that.  Would be good to have the option to require entries to match ANY or ALL specified categories.

Mine would have to be for the exp_search table to be log more details about the search, specifically the matching options chosen.

I would like to add to the above by requesting that the search be updated to make use of the MySQL full text Boolean Search functionality so that Boolean operators like AND and OR can be use in the search keywords. This would also allow search results to be scored so that users could see the relevance of the search results returned and entries could be ordered by this score.

Well since we’re adding more,

I would like to be able to paginate the search results using the same pagination as weblogs do. Instead of having total number of pages with a number for each page of the search results, I’d like to see a “next / previous” pagination feature.

I’ll throw my voice in here.  I think it is important to get some kind of relevance going with EE search - I’m not sure if there is any now?  Even if you return results first that include the term in the title I think it could help - for example recently I needed to search for a wiki page and was given the exact page name, “Comments on Index”. Doing that search returns 2 pages of results, and the page with that title comes up 3rd from last (on the 2nd page). Some kind of weighting of results would make searches much more relevant.

Adding my vote, especially to number 3:

3.  Ability to search in only specified custom fields- the finer grain the control on this one, the nicer it would be

For example:
http://www.ccof.org/directories.php

Also, I’d like the URL of the results to be more like this. In case we search for the term apple

or at least

or similar. This makes almost an API for external search queries for a EE web site.

Why? For example, I love the way I can search the EE docs just by typing in my URL box: ee apple
(using SafariStand with QuickSeach and EE as shortcut to

where @key is the search term. I know Firefox has this abilty by default.)

While I’m glad that it does, I think the fact that the docs section uses Google as a search engine is a bit telling

Brian M. - 25 November 2007 02:37 PM

While I’m glad that it does, I think the fact that the docs section uses Google as a search engine is a bit telling

Brian,

I am not a native english speaker, so I don’t fully understand. What are you glad “it” does?

I just wish the URL is something more telling than:

I’m glad that it does so that I can actually find what I’m looking for…

I am sorry Brian, I still don’t fully understand your comment, but be free to to ignore me.

I just was not sure if you like the way EE makes and url at the search results or you fancy more the google style or clean example.com/search/apple style.

It may have been suggested before, but I would add that using google custom search on your EE site will allow you a vastly more “relevant” search. We cannot expect either mysql or EE to have the “search intelligence” of the google index.

elemental: You can achieve that now to an extent with “auto search”, a way of building and submitting a search form on the fly based on information in the URL.

kstatham: Custom field searching is now possible directly with the weblog entries tag.  It supports dynamic parameters, and of course, you can even get crazier if you like, so that http://example.com/index.php/beer/list/type/bock/ could be used like so:

Derek: Thank you. I didn’t know this was possible the “auto search” term did not occure to me. This is half way what I had in mind (even more then half way) since the functionality is met. I only wish the resulting URL on the results page would contain the searched term instead of the random number (XID i guess).

But still this answered my request almost fully. Thank you.

UPDATE: Just tried it and it works great.

handyman: I didn’t think that EE could replace the google algorithm but simly mimic a similar URL scheme and auto search function.

Derek, my apologies for not replying sooner. Thanks for the help with this. Can you point to where I might find more info on how to pass user-entered data, from a form field, to a url segment? Can seem to wrap my head around this one.

Thanks again,
Ken

You could use dynamic parameters, or even a simple select field with pre-built URLs, redirecting to that location with a Javascript onchange event handler.

Derek Jones - 26 November 2007 11:29 AM

elemental: You can achieve that now to an extent with “auto search”, a way of building and submitting a search form on the fly based on information in the URL.

kstatham: Custom field searching is now possible directly with the weblog entries tag.  It supports dynamic parameters, and of course, you can even get crazier if you like, so that http://example.com/index.php/beer/list/type/bock/ could be used like so:

{exp:weblog:entries search:{segment_3}="{segment_4}"}

About the auto search. Is there anyway to have the URL stay as “http://www.reedmaniac.com/search/auto/ExpressionEngine/” for example? I’d be nice if those pages got picked up in search engines. I’m looking more to create static keyword pages rather than general search results. I know I can use categories for the same effect, but there’d be too many variations that my category list would be a mess. Any ideas?

Oldtimer - if you need it to stay in the URL, why not use the search: parameter?

As a note, if you still want some help with this, please start a thread up in how-to, explaining exactly what your goal is.  Let’s leave this thread to the feature requests.  Thanks =)