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Author Topic: Ktools really needs some search modification  (Read 5194 times)

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« on: September 21, 2012, 03:13 »
0
Perhaps they are already working on this, but if someone has a quick fix I'd be interested in hearing it.

As it is now (version 4.0.9) on my site, when you search for cow (wanting the animal that eats grass) the search will automatically sort the images by the latest uploaded first and return any result with cow within the word.  That means that coworker will be a positive hit.  So.. when a buyer searches for cow they get 5 pages of business teams and on the last page finally a cow turns up.  Not good.  It would be really great to be able to tweek the search somehow, choose which is the default search sort and have the best matches show up first. 

I realize the broad search is usefull to catch plurals and 'ing' or 'ed' endings, but it also returns a lot of false positives as well :-[


« Reply #1 on: September 21, 2012, 10:32 »
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I have tested a lot of searches (especially our competitors) and I personally feel we have one of the best based on PHP/MySQL.
However we are still improving it as we get feedback from users on it.

However if you want to search for just "cow" your users or you can use the "exact" search method (look in left menu and put a check in the exact box).
UPDATE: Also doing a search with " around the word will equal doing an exact search. Example searching cow and "cow" will give different results.

Then again I am not sure what version you have? You may not have the exact box, I think that came about in 4.0.8 or 4.0.9 (not sure off hand).
« Last Edit: September 21, 2012, 10:38 by Ktools_Jeff »

fujiko

« Reply #2 on: September 21, 2012, 11:31 »
+1
Maybe a good solution would be to return the exact match results first regardless of the search being cow or "cow". Or return two result sets "exact match" first followed by "contains search term".
Anything that is done at server level to improve the results for the client is much better than telling the client to use special options.

« Reply #3 on: September 21, 2012, 11:33 »
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I can't speak to Ktools competitors, but the search is poor compared to my competitors. Granted, most of my competitors are custom built solutions. Still... the fact remains that when customers come to my site, the search is going to be noticeably inferior to pretty much any other site. That's not a deal breaker now because most of my traffic is walk in from Google, so I can let Google's search do the heavy lifting. But I also realize at some point (if my site continues to grow), I'm going to have to get it fixed or have a custom solution built.

« Reply #4 on: September 21, 2012, 13:24 »
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Jon and I are kicking around some ideas on how to improve the search. We have an idea right now of maybe making a percentage based system to help return the results in a "best first" format. Example the phrase cow being searched and it finds the keyword cows in the list. That matches 3 of 4 characters, vs finding the word coworkers where it would be 3 of 9. So the higher percentage would be cows (shown first).

We have a lot more ideas and will be improving this search.

« Reply #5 on: September 21, 2012, 13:55 »
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that sounds good.  exact matches should still show up first - no matter what IMO

What about something like this (which I found in my effort to modify the search myself.. until I took a look at the search file and realized I was in over my head)
Quote
SELECT * from photos
WHERE searchterm like 'cow' 
union all
SELECT * from photos
WHERE searchterm LIKE '%cow%' and searchterm not like 'cow'

this will list exact matches first

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1016804/how-to-sort-mysql-fulltext-search-results-by-relevancy

« Reply #6 on: September 21, 2012, 16:33 »
0
Jon and I are kicking around some ideas on how to improve the search. We have an idea right now of maybe making a percentage based system to help return the results in a "best first" format. Example the phrase cow being searched and it finds the keyword cows in the list. That matches 3 of 4 characters, vs finding the word coworkers where it would be 3 of 9. So the higher percentage would be cows (shown first).

We have a lot more ideas and will be improving this search.

That sounds like it could work. I think weighting for having terms in the title and description would probably be a nice feature too. That way you get images of cows before images of farms with cows in the background.

But, I'm not really sure what is possible.

« Reply #7 on: September 22, 2012, 01:35 »
+1
For me it seems like the best option is to have the ktools default search be as close to the most popular micro stock searches as possible for the best chance of our independent sites competing we must be able to give customers what they are used to. 

On the other micro stock sites and Google images search for example they do not have to use quotes or check a box to search for the word they type in, and if they use two search terms they can expect images with both of those terms to show up FIRST. This is the most important thing in my mind.  customers are not searching for single terms for the most part. As both a long time designer/buyer and a micro stock contributor/site owner I rarely if ever type in just one term, and when I type in a phrase I expect images that have all of the tags I've put in.

Weighted searches would be absolutely an amazing addition to this script BUT starting out with the basics to match our biggest competition (match all terms AND exact match by default) is essential!

« Reply #8 on: October 29, 2012, 15:17 »
0
that sounds good.  exact matches should still show up first - no matter what IMO

What about something like this (which I found in my effort to modify the search myself.. until I took a look at the search file and realized I was in over my head)
Quote
SELECT * from photos
WHERE searchterm like 'cow' 
union all
SELECT * from photos
WHERE searchterm LIKE '%cow%' and searchterm not like 'cow'

this will list exact matches first

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1016804/how-to-sort-mysql-fulltext-search-results-by-relevancy


I kind of disagree with that only because of what query logic would consider an exact match.

For example plural vs singular words.
What if someone searches for "cat" shouldn't "cats" show up as well? If an exact search is done it will not.
Or like peach vs peaches, jump vs jumping, etc...
Proper keywording should prevent most of this but that isn't always the case.

As you can tell by looking in the search file, there is a ton of stuff that goes on in the search and it isn't as easy as it would seem to be. This is why most of our competitors also do it the same as well (cow will return coworker, etc..), and why I still think even with the current search in photostore 4 it is still way better than a lot of our competitors.

Anyways Jon is actually building the relevance feature on the search, so the highest percentage is returned first. May have it completed for 4.1.3.


« Reply #9 on: October 30, 2012, 10:33 »
0
Here is a new search file to try on your ktools photostore 4.1.1+
If you don't have 4.1.1 or greater this will not work.

Download search.zip, extract file to get search.php, copy search.php to root of your store files (you may want to rename your old search.php for backup).
You can now test the search and you should get items in relevant order. Example cow before coworker if searching for cow, or man before woman if searching for man. In those examples coworkers will not even show on the list since it is less than 70% match, same with woman since it is 60% match.

By default there is a cut off of 70% match, anything less than 70% will not show.
You can add this line to your assest/tweak.php file:
$config['searchRelevance'] = 70;               // Minimum amount of relevance from a search

Then adjust the 70 to what ever percentage you would like the cut off at.

« Reply #10 on: October 30, 2012, 11:15 »
0
Here is the newest search.php.

Jon made a slight change.

« Reply #11 on: November 23, 2012, 12:16 »
0
any updates on this one?

is the new search.php as good as everyone expected?

« Reply #12 on: November 23, 2012, 12:26 »
0
any updates on this one?

is the new search.php as good as everyone expected?

Not sure. I don't have version 4, so I can't test these files.

« Reply #13 on: November 26, 2012, 14:09 »
0
Yup, the Standard search sucks, I mention that to the IT company working on my "CSS", they said there's an another way around (some sort of professional search script you can buy and install) but I'm not sure how much it'll cost! (probably more than the Script itself) anyway, I'll post "my solution" once we reach that part of our site.




« Reply #14 on: November 26, 2012, 17:58 »
0
I haven't bothered to install the latest update - I've heard it is quite a bit better though.  I can post an update if I install it and whether I choose to keep it or keep my old 'custom search'.
 I hired a custom coder to modify the search quite a bit and have been pretty happy with the results


 

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