issues with search results

[lunchblocksParticipant]

Hello,
I just bought your plugin and I am very excited to get it up and going!
I have been having a couple of issues, and I’m sure this comes down to me not setting it up right, there are so many options!
My website is about food so I need to be able to search through ingredients, recipe titles and it’s content (description, steps notes etc…)
So far they are four things that are not working right for me:
1) first if I search for spinach: I start with spi and the autofill fills in for me the rest: “frozen chopped spinach”, great, but:
• first it overlaps my text so we get : spizen chopped etc… (confusing)
• and then if I try to click on what the autofilled text is showing, because it is indeed what I want to choose, nothing happens.
2) it doesn’t find everything. for example if I search “rice” which is in in the description of this recipe: http://www.lunchblocks.com/recipe/spaghetti-bolognese/
the search comes back with “no results”.
3) •I have a question and answer plugin installed and if I search a word from a title, nothing comes back.
• If I search one of its categories, the word gets autofilled in and again can’t select that and here it directly ads the no results

4) when searching for users, I would like to see what they have posted but (comments, recipes, questions or answer, posts etc…) but in that case it only finds their profile page.

Thank you!

[Ernest MarcinkoKeymaster]

Hi!

It looks like you have discovered a few bugs, it appears 🙂

Thank you for the correct description and the login information, it made my work much faster.

1. You are right, it was not working correctly, the suggested words were incorrect. I’ve used the FTP account to do some debugging, and found a programming error, which resulted printing the incorrect word. The word should be relevant and correct now.

To get the autofilled text actually filled, you need to press the right arrow on your keyboard, and it finishes the suggestion. I know it’s strange, but when I built the engine, the google suggest used this same method, but now it’s different. I will try to work out a better, more convenient solution in the future for sure.

2. Another bug I discovered, that on the layout options panel, when the user login was selected as the user name field, the search did not go through as there was a typing error in the field value. Once I fixed that, it started working as configured. I’m definitely fixing this in the upcoming version, as I was not aware of this tiny issue 🙂

3. Same as the 2. issue, it should be working as well.

4. In this case you need the “Index table” engine. Posts and custom post types related to names can be indexed together, but comments not. So searching for a user name should give you the submitted posts, pages, recipes and q&a stuff which the user posted, but not the regular post comments (those are unfortunately stored differently in wordpress). I see you did configure the index table correctly for this task. I’ve switched to the index table engine on the search General Options panel to have this in effect.

Another reason to use the index table engine instead of the regular one is the fact that you have the “OR with exact keyword matches” search logic activated – which works far better with the index table engine, as there are no special characters involved in the index table, and therefore the word boundaries are recognized far efficiently. That means more relevant results.

Let me know if you need any more help!

Best,
Ernest Marcinko
If you like my products, don't forget to rate them on codecanyon :)

[lunchblocksParticipant]

Great! Thanks for such great support and I’m glad I could help by finding those bugs ; )

1) It looks like you have to have the full word typed now in order to get a result.
If I start typing spi it automatically give me the “no result”.

Ouh la, the right arrow… (almost) Nobody would ever know that. I wonder if I should add a line here to explain that or just deactivate the autofill option.

Another quick question, I have a search by ingredient drop down menu that is created by my recipe plugin. Is that something that I can do with your plugin? Not a big deal, it is just for visual consistency sake I guess that I would like to do that.

Thanks again!

[Ernest MarcinkoKeymaster]

You are welcome!

I think it’s possible to add a similar dropdown. As a test I’ve added a drop-down to the settings list with “bay leaf” and “chili” in it, and it appears it’s filtering correctly: https://i.imgur.com/jljigjW.png

You can edit or remove this box on the Frontend search settings -> Custom fields panel: https://i.imgur.com/TMXy04c.png

I believe you can edit this box to add more ingredients you have. I don’t actually know how the recipe plugin stores the ingredients data, so it might not work 100% correctly, it might show more/less results as expected, but so far if I select “chili” from the ingredients and type in “spagetthi” then no spaggetthi is shown, but if I type in “chili” the Yum Yum chili comes up – so I’m guessing it’s correct.

Before you jump in, this is a very advanced feature, and I recommend reading the documentation on custom field filter selectors first to understand how it works. There is also a video tutorial available if you are interested. I’ve already configured yours, you just need to enter the additional ingredient values.

Also, please leave the first line untouched on the ingredients selector editor: https://i.imgur.com/nLstwmd.png
It’s neccessary, as it creates an empty filter, otherwise all results would be filtered by the first ingredient on the list – giving you incorrect results.

Best,
Ernest Marcinko
If you like my products, don't forget to rate them on codecanyon :)

[lunchblocksParticipant]

Hi Ernest,

I just noticed that there’s a new update for Ajax search Pro and I before I installed it I wanted to check with you. You said you had modified a few things locally in my plugin, would I loose those changes?

Thanks!

[Ernest MarcinkoKeymaster]

Hi!

You can update safely. I’ve fixed these issues in this release. You can follow the safe update guide to make sure everything goes smoothly.

Best,
Ernest Marcinko
If you like my products, don't forget to rate them on codecanyon :)

[lunchblocksParticipant]

Great, thank you.

[Author]

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