Search is acting strange after updating to 12912 DLL

[AbleMods]

I updated the CommerceBuilder DLL to the 12912 flavor today - saw that the search had been "fixed" however I am not seeing expected results. Based on the Bugzilla notes, I think it's been updated with the wrong logic.

Example: http://www.solunar.com
Enter: "golden steel bbs" in the search box at the top.
result: you get hundreds and hundreds of results, all of which contain either "golden", or "steel", or "bbs".

That's incorrect.

When multiple keywords are used, we still want an "AND" logic applied. Searching for "Stainless Steel Bowl" should provide results of products that contain "stainless" AND "steel" AND "bowl" but not necessarily all together. It's not that we don't want the "AND" logic, it's that we don't want the logic to require all the words to be together. So the search algorithm should be splitting the keywords out and building a query that combines each keyword with the "AND" logic.

Searching for "stainless" or "steel" or "bowl" is practically worthless as the search results will hardly have been narrowed at all.

I want to find all the products where the word "stainless" and the word "steel" and the word "bowl" are all on the same product.

This is like the 3rd time we've gone at this search issue and it's still not right.

Re Bugzilla: http://bugs.ablecommerce.com/show_bug.cgi?id=8128

[jmestep]

I put the new dll on my son-in-law's site and turned on FTS and found the same problem--- way, way too many results. I hadn't stopped to analyze why it was happening like Joe did. I was just tempted to turn it off again, but then I thought I might add a hover panel with search tips instead.

[Shopping Cart Admin]

Hello Joe,

It's working for me:

I entered "golden steel bbs" with the quotes and it returned 1 result. Without quotes it returns all records with any of the keywords in it. Seems to me this is the correct behavior and it matches the logic described in the bug report.

[jmestep]

Mike,
The problem is that the customer won't know to enter the quotes and if they use quotes but rearrange the words, they won't get the result. Like "steel golden bbs " instead of "golden steel bbs".
The FTS search is great because it shows results that didn't show up before, but in some cases it shows way to many. I even thought about putting "paintball" in a stoplist on my son-in-law's site to narrow down the results since almost all his products have "paintball" in one place or another.

[AbleMods]

I entered "golden steel bbs" with the quotes and it returned 1 result.

My apologies for the lack of clarity: When I wrote "golden steel bbs" I was only using the quotes to accent the search words themselves - I'm not typing the quotes in when I enter the values.

I'm not saying it's bugged - just that the logic is unexpected. Most people are far more accustomed to the -and- logic. If you enter golden steel bbs, one would expect to see products that include all three words golden, steel and bbs in the description but not necessarily all together.

This isn't the case with 12912. Without quotes, it's using -or- logic. Type in most any 3 words and you're going to get hundreds of results when you expected only a few.

Look at this way: The more words you type, the more restrictive the result set should be. As it is now in 12912, the more words you type the -greater- number of results you receive. That's counter-intuitive to how traditional search mechanisms work.

[dc8johnson]

Any updates on the multi-word search using OR logic instead of AND logic?

Thanks,

[GrfxDan]

I too would like to know if there's been any progress on this fix. Search functionality is very important for my customers to be able to find products. I'm getting plenty of traffic but not much conversion and I attribute some of that to the search not working as one would expect. I'm willing to pay to get this bug fixed if anyone knows how to...

[mazhar]

This bug seems fixed to me. Go and see http://bugs.ablecommerce.com/show_bug.cgi?id=8128 report. There are fixed DLLS avilable in attachment section. You can download and patch the latest DLL according to your AbleCommerce version.

[GrfxDan]

This bug seems fixed to me. Go and see http://bugs.ablecommerce.com/show_bug.cgi?id=8128 report. There are fixed DLLS avilable in attachment section. You can download and patch the latest DLL according to your AbleCommerce version.

The "fix" may address other issues with FTS but it does not address the -and- vs -or- issue described in this thread.

I am running the latest CommerceBuilder build (13453) on my website, http://www.decalstore.com, and multiple search terms are still queried with an -or- operator. For example, try searching for "red" (without the quotes) and try searching for "skin" (again, without the quotes). You should get 15 results for "red" and 179 results for "skin". Now, try searching for "red skin" (without the quotes). You SHOULD get 9 results: items with both of the search terms "red" and "skin". Instead, you get 185 results: items with EITHER search term "red" OR "skin". This is the problem and it still remains.

[GrfxDan]

I was just reading the notes on bug 8361 and it appears that prior to CommerceBuilder build 12912 the FTS treated multiple search terms as a phrase. For example, a search for "red skin" (without the quotes) would look for items which contained the exact phrase "red skin", both words in that exact order. The "fix" that was implemented changed FTS to search for any search term that was entered (in my example it would look for EITHER "red" OR "skin"). The CORRECT fix would be to look for both "red" and "skin" but not requiring the exact phrase "red skin". I think Joe explains this much better in his post above.

At any rate, this problem does still exist and really needs to be fixed ASAP. Multiple search terms should reduce the number of products returned, not increase the number. The way the search currently works is counter-intuitive. How can we get this issue put back on the table so it gets resolved quickly since it has apparently already been considered as resolved for some time now?

[jmestep]

Here is another recent thread on the search problems.
viewtopic.php?f=42&t=13127

[GrfxDan]

If AbleCommerce doesn't fix this bug soon would any of the developers out there be able to offer a fix? I'm willing to pay a reasonable fee for your time.