I was testing a few things on my site for a few products and when I used the search feature to find a particular keyword the results brought back a large number of products which did not even related to the search I was trying to make.

The keyword I was entering was "ladybug" and I received a large number of products which do not have that keyword or word anywhere.

i have tried other keywords to search on and the results are all the same, a large number of products are coming back which do not relate to what I am searching on. Right now the search feature does not work correctly and would not benefit my customers.

Can someone please take a look at my site and figure out what is wrong. The site is www.equickxpress.com

It looks like you have every possible field checked to search, that means that if "ladybug" shows up anywhere - product, category, manufacturer, meta tags, descriptions, variations - it will show up in search results. Limit the fields that are being searched to only those where you want that term searched.

I ran into the same thing. It was very frustrating. I turned off searching by the full description and now instruct our people to use the meta key words for relevant search terms.

I have found that Phrase searching just doesn't work at all. Turning off the Search by full description really helped but now we have to keyword over 8000 items.

I really liked the old version search. It returned relevant product with out all the fumbling around

AndyT

I might agree with you if the keywords being searched were in any of those search fields for the products being display. The problem is the search words being used are not in those products. Plus why would I not want to pull up any possible search term on the words being used, it does not make sense to be limiting where the search results are looking.

to provide all possible products with those words is what the search feature should do but what is happening now is the search is pulling up a lot of products which do not have the word anywhere in any of those fields.

What might be the point of having all these search fields if you have to uncheck them in order to get the search results to work.

That's just it though, it can be in any of the related fields you have selected. For example, if "ladybug" is in the category short description, or even category meta keywords, and a product is in that category then it will return in the search results.

Think of it as a car stereos in an "accessories" category, where the "accessories" category has a meta description of "ladybug air fresheners". A search for "ladybug" would bring up car stereos, and although that is bizarre it would be correct if you choose category meta description as a search parameter.

So, with this in hand, if you want "ladybug" to come back ONLY when it is in product information, then uncheck all of the manufacturer and category fields and it will no longer search them for related keywords.

I guess that makes more sense then to me.

What happens when I uncheck anything for the category fields and a customer then searches on a category name like bed tents?

The products in the bed tents category would have the have those words in the other fields then, otherwise the search would not pull up everything in the bed tent category.

I will play around with the fields and see which options give me the best results. I just have been using the search the same for a while now and everything seemed to pull up ok before.

Thanks for clearing things up.

Category name is probably not that bad of a thing to include for product searches, it is when you get down into some of the more obscure fields (category meta, for example) that results begin to blur.

Also, if you have category search results enabled, then the search for "bed tents" will show categories that match the search keywords as welll as products.