A custom ExpressionEngine search module

Hi,

It would be great if it were possible:

1) to search entries posted in certain categories without at first specifying any weblog (currently advanced search form allows to search entries posted in certain categories only by at first selecting some weblog); some time ago I asked for this functionality in this feature request;

2) to search entries whose URLs conform to certain pattern, e.g. to search all entries whose URLs conform to pattern http://www.mysite.com/index.php/posts/technical/gadgets/* This functionality is implemented in Google custom search

FYI - I wrote Yahoo! BOSS Search plugin. Unfortunately, Yahoo! BOSS does not have possibilities to implement both features.

Customising pagination for search results - so instead of (or as well as) the layout or html being forced to a certain layout, allow developers to access the key variables, e.g. first, next, page x, etc.

Then in true Expression Engine fashion, we have full flexibility over the implementation within our templates.

Mission impossible: within the search results, somehow allow the option of pulling our the paragraph or fixed word count around the searched word or term, so in the search results page, instead of showing the beginning of the entries text, the actual snippet from that text that is relevant to the search can be shown. Like Google.

😊

Being able to search members’ public profiles (names, bios, etc.) would be great. I haven’t found any way to do this in the current search implementation.

Search is one place where I think EE really falls behind, so I am very excited to see what you come up with!

My main feature request would be to extend Search to search the Gallery module as well!

There is currently no way to search galleries - I’d love for a visitor to be able to type in, say, “kitten” and get all the blog posts as well as all the photos that match the keyword. 😊

Search should show results for blogs, articles, forum posts, wiki, etc.

Great input so far, all. Please, keep it coming…

Mission impossible: within the search results, somehow allow the option of pulling our the paragraph or fixed word count around the searched word or term, so in the search results page, instead of showing the beginning of the entries text, the actual snippet from that text that is relevant to the search can be shown. Like Google.

The Excerpt plugin may help with this for now.

At the top of my list: search by relevance - at the very least, a post with keywords in the title field should appear before a post with keywords elsewhere, but it could be more robust than that.

This is a great idea. I look forward to seeing the outcome!

We’ve done pretty extensive modifications to the search module on one of the sites we’ve worked on, and I’d love to see some of what we’ve done make it to a more formalized module. Specifically:

1. We implemented relevance via putting results in the following order: First: Exact title matching Second: partial-word title matching Third: Any field matching

2. We also changed around the search to treat accented and unaccented versions of characters as equivalent– so a search for “cafe” brings back “café” results.

3. Specific AND/OR for categories by category group. We added a parameter to the search module that lets you choose, in the actual advanced_form search tag or via a user-set drop down, which category groups are searched using “OR” rules, and which are searched via “AND” rules.

Thanks for looking into tackling this.

-Matt

@Twobelowzero: Totally custom Search pagination is already possible with a plugin: BU Search Pagination. I’m using that plugin at devot:ee (devot-ee.com), and have used it on other sites as well. It’s great.

All I want is some basic relevance. If I search “fieldframe” at devot:ee, I would think that entries with “fieldframe” in the title should come before those entries where that word is buried in the text somewhere - but no, the actual FieldFrame entry is the 11th result out of 11 results, and other entries where the word is in the title are also lower in the results than apparently unrelated looking posts - that’s ridiculous!

EDIT: Matt must have written and posted right as I was writing my entry. Sounds like he has made inroads into some sort of search relevance. Awesome!

@Ryan and @ruraldreams: Thanks for the head up - I’d read about them before and either forgot or thought they didn’t do what I wanted.

Many Thanks.

Another vote for relevance. This is - by an English mile - the biggest failure of the search module, and the one aspect of an EE site that my clients consistently complain about.

Yes, relevance is very important. Another thing my clients often ask for is for search to check for mis-spellings, synonyms etc. Difficult I know, but would be great to have this. Maybe a file of synonyms / mis-spellings which can be added to based on entries in the search log which return no results.

Also, search pages that can be linked to (ie with keywords rather than a MD5 hash in the URL) would be nice.

If someone enters a category name in their search, posts in that category should be returned. (this can be got round via Preparse extension I think)

Would be great to be able to search related entries (so say a post is related to three or four people in a “People” weblog, if I search for the name of the Person, it would be cool to have the entries related to them returned, optionally.

Results to be separated by Weblog - so you have results in News, results in Blog (I know this can get messy with Pagination, and I’ve fudged it myself in the past).

Just a few ideas there. If you can get somewhere close, I’ll doubtless install this on every project.

An option/parameter to search in specific custom fields. When working with multilingual sites using one entry with the language variation (like Mark Huots SimpleTranslator) searching within specific language is impossible with the standard search in EE since it seraches all fields with search_in=”entries” parameter.

search_in_fields="title_sk|summary_sk|body_sk"

This paramter would for example, search only in the these specific custom fileds containing the slovak lang translation.

I would love to see the ability to search against multiple fields, rather than just keywords. So if you had a site that featured properties you could search against “City” or “Zip Code” in conjunction with the keyword term.