I read on this forum a reference to an "Customer Advanced Search" on the storefront. In V4 we had a link to advanced search where the customer could search for phrases or by manufacturer or by catagory, but it was their choice.

Is there this type of functionality available in V7? I have my search set to display manufacturer, and catagory which is fine but our customers seems to be still having alot of difficulty finding what they are looking for and we did not have that issue in V4.

The latest update says some improvement was made to display "Customer Advanced Search" in Explorer. I use Explorer and I notice no difference in the search button or display so I am hoping that I am just not using some function that will make customer search even better.

The feature you are referring to is the Customer Search in the administration panel under Sales > Customers. I'm sorry for the confusion.

Well that makes sense... but does that mean that there is no advanced search for our storefront. We are getting way too many calls about not being able to find stuff anymore on our site. We did not get these calls on V4.

Dani, Good to see you in 7.

The search in v7 is a lot better than the search in v4, not that we have perfected it yet. But there are some settings in the control panel that can effect your search results. I would recommend changing these a bit and trying out some searches until you get the results that you like.

Go to Operations>>Search Options and configure it.

I agree with Rick. Search has greatly improved in v7. Keep fiddling with those settings. Try adding more search terms to your products meta keywords field and be sure to use that field in your search options.

I have tried fiddling with the settings. It is not very clear as to what each of these settings actually do. Seems to me that if everything was checked to search for then no matter what the customer was looking for he should be able to find it. I have been complaining about the search function since we first migrated which is when we started to get complaints ourselves about not being able to find what the customer was looking for. It either returns too much information or not enough. Sometimes what is returned does not even make sense.

V4 seemed like it was better . The following is an actual email I received from a customer on Sept 22.

" tried to use your site to get the tools necessary to rebuild my transmissions.
I could not find anything I needed.
I am sure you have many satisfied customers, but you may be losing many more. "

I never received emails like this before. We get a ton of calls on it as well.

We are attempting to Keyword everything but with 7000+ products it will take us forever to get that squared away.

I am sure I am not the only one with this problem. I have been selling on-line since 1999 (With Monster) and never had customers complain about not being able to find what they need.

Man, that is a bummer of an email. Shame they weren't more specific about what they couldn't find so you could try to find it yourself.

I have to disagree with you on having everything selected in the search area. To me, if you didn't have keywords on your products, that would be one field you could deselect. If you have content in the description field that seems like very descriptive, then that field might be a good one to have enabled. I am not certain as to why you(ourselves included) would want to have the meta description searchable as well.

Maybe one of these guys(a NetSOL staffer) can tell us which fields enabled in the search would most resemble the way v4 use to search. Don't give up on it, just keep a fiddling with the settings until you find it, then let us know.

I hate to keep beating a dead horse but search results on my site do not make any sense and I can not get it to work right.

I have been messing with all the options however it still does not give me any results I would really expect. For example I do not seem to be able to pull up product with a phrase. I have tried putting the phrase in quotes , I tried to string them with the word "and" yet it always pulls up weirld stuff. I am getting frustrated enough to consider buying a search engine for my site. If I do that can I have it installed, NetSol.

This is really affecting my business is the worse way.
Maybe there is something wrong with my search engine on my site. I really need someone from NetSol to recognize there is a problem and help me fix it. PLEASEEEEEEEEE . I have been fussing about this for weeks.i