Product Search
In version 3.5.0.0 of the Khaos Control Web plugin, we have made a number of changes to how the search works in order to improve the reliability and the results returned to the user.
The main changes that have been made are as follows:
- Multi-word searches will now be compared to the Web Slug after having any spaces replaced with hyphens, and any special characters removed, to better match the contents of the Web Slug.
- The web category data will not be loaded as part of the search results, as it was previously, as it isn't used by the website, which should improve speed.
- Weightings have been added to the specific fields that the search term matches on, which should improve the "relevancy" ordering of results, as previously a product that matched on a lot of "meta" fields would be higher up than one matching on the Web Slug.
The weightings are as follows:
| Field | Weighting |
|---|---|
| Stock Code exact match | 20 |
| Stock Code partial match | 15 |
| Web Slug all terms match | 13 |
| Web Slug any terms match | 11 |
| Short Description | 9 |
| Meta Title | 3 |
| Meta Description | 3 |
| Meta Keywords | 3 |
| UDA multi-term match | 5 |
| UDA individual term match | 5 |
If a product matches multiple terms within the search, the weightings for these terms will be added together in order to calculate the final weighting. This means that products that match more terms within a search will have significantly higher weightings than ones that only match a single term.
If you want to improve the positioning of a product, or have it show for a result that it wasn't previously, then you should be able to use these weightings to add the search term to the product data in specific areas based on the weightings.
NOTE: It is also possible to affect the positioning of products that have the same weightings, by using the "Web Page Order" field in "Stock" > "Telesales / Internet" > "Secondary". The lower the value of this field, the closer to the start the result is shown.