[Catalog-sig] Cheese shop: search

Ian Bicking ianb at colorstudy.com
Fri Oct 20 18:15:46 CEST 2006


Richard Jones wrote:
> On Tuesday 26 September 2006 01:51, Ian Bicking wrote:
>> Can we please get the search back?
> 
> If someone writes it, sure. The old search was far less useful that the Google 
> search is now.

I thought my email outlined why the Google search is completely useless. 
  To summarize: it's useless.  The old search was a little awkward, but 
it worked.  Simply putting it back as it was would be a step forward.

And actually the only improvement I'd like to see in the old search is a 
way to search all fields at once, and then a search form on the front 
page -- but even without these the search is functional.  Well, if we 
wanted to be really fancy we'd want a full text indexer in the database, 
which probably isn't installed, and then create a field that contained 
the full text of each entry by simply concatenating items, and probably 
giving weight to some metadata by doing something scrappy like:

full_text = title + title + keywords + keywords + topics + topics + 
description

Otherwise if we are sticking with Google, cheese shop at least needs to 
tell google not to index the browse pages.  And probably needs to give 
google a sitemap so it will index all the packages more prompty, as it's 
not indexing nearly often enough right now.

-- 
Ian Bicking | ianb at colorstudy.com | http://blog.ianbicking.org


More information about the Catalog-sig mailing list