AbleCommerce Shopping Cart Software

I am somewhat disappointed that the search capability does not support searching webpages out-of-the-box. But I'm even more disappointed in the lack of guidance on how to implement. This is a very important requirement for my application. I would assume a search box would be a site search not limited to products/categories. And I think most users would assume the same.

So I found this question asked before and in one case went unanswered:
viewtopic.php?f=65&t=17763&p=76677#p76677

and this one that says it's possible but very little on how to do it:
viewtopic.php?f=42&t=9032&p=38814&hilit ... GES#p38814

and this one seems to provide a way but not too much on implementation details:
viewtopic.php?f=42&t=18411&p=80545&hili ... GES#p80545

Comment:
I feel something like this should be well-documented and perhaps even a step-by-step example on its implementation. If such documentation exists, I was unable to find it.

This request has come up before and we've discussed it with the development team. Here is what they had to say -

That will be very big change! The reason is all our retails searches are tightly coupled with the use of product instances. In order to return webpages we will have to refactor almost all search related interfaces and conlib controls to work with catalog nodes. I don't think there is any easy way to fit it in existing system. I would suggest we should slide it to future and then implement it after doing some research about how to make it fit with minimal impact.


I don't know if this will help, but our dev team wrote up some instructions and provided sample code to implement Google Search as an integration. We use it for our own site and it can even search pages using multiple websites - which is very nice!

http://wiki.ablecommerce.com/index.php/ ... ample_Code

If this is not something you are interested in, then the feature has already been requested, so please take a moment to add your vote:

http://ablecommerce.uservoice.com/forum ... nclude-the

Thank you Katie. I have voted for this feature. Meanwhile, I will look at other workarounds, including a google implementation, which might be the best approach.

Sounds great, and I appreciate that you took the time to vote.

If you want an example of how we implemented the Google search, please go here: http://ablecommerce.net/

It could be a lot better if we had integrated it in our website instead of using a different domain though. I use it all the time.

It looks to me that the free google implementation (Custom Search Engine aka CSE) includes google ads at the top of the search results. Or one can go the route of a paid plan (Google Site Search), the least expensive is $100 for 20K searches/year (50 queries per day).

Chip's solution on this page might be the best workaround for now:

http://ablecommerce.uservoice.com/forum ... nclude-the

Good to know. I updated the Wiki article with this information.