Search engine & and AND

[deanosaur1972]

Can the search engine have a tweak please. &/and should return the same results.

So someone searching for Birmingham and Worcestershire Canal should be returned a listing of Birmingham & Worcestershire Canal. Likewise someone searching for Birmingham & Worcestershire Canal should be also be returned listings Birmingham and Worcestershire Canal.

Probably a clearer example of a search (as there are more of them) is Mills & Boon.

Mills & Boon = 2,363 items
Mills and Boon = 112 items

They should ideally return the same results.

[Idealproductsales]

*VERY* hard to do in MySQL . Evidently they must have tweaked MySQL to search on 3 letter terms - MySQL Default is 4 letters or more, it would ignore the word "and" in MySQL default settings, as well as ampersand (&) and any other "words" less than 4 characters long.
They may have tweaked search to use "AND" as an "inclusive" (Mills AND Boon would return only items matching both words, while Mills OR Boon would return results containing *either* mills or boon, as well as both)

Search can be very tricky to get right.. Been there done that. I doubt that eBid even has the resources to get into making a really good search engine (and , IMHO, this one is far and away better than *cough*cassini*cough* )

Your search term Mills & Boon, because it ignores the ampersand (&) returns results containing both Mills and Boon, as well as results containing *either* term (an OR search) which may explain the disparity - do a little more research, and I bet you that the Mills & Boon search will *also* bring up all the listings that *match* "Mills and Boon" (And I'm not even going to get into the + and - modifiers, the quoted search, etc...)

In other words, I'd say that current search is about as good as it can possibly get considering the database, and all the possible meanings of the word "And" , the word "or", as well as &,-, and + (if they are even looked at, that is.. the programming to do so can get quite complex.)

[hurryb4itsgone]

Ideal, if I understand what you are saying ... then when we write titles we are better off using & rather than writing out and. Is that the gist of it?

[JanetB]

Ideal, if I understand what you are saying ... then when we write titles we are better off using & rather than writing out and. Is that the gist of it?

That's the way I understand it.

[Idealproductsales]

No - I was just explaining that when you *search* , using & is ignored so..

If you have a title: "Miller and Coors" , and a person searches "Miller and Coors", they find your listing (and any others that match all 3 words)

if they search "Miller & Coors" the & is ignored for their search, and your listing should still come up (along with a LOT more than when searching "and" as any listing with "Miller and Coors" and "Miller & Coors" or just "Miller Coors" will come up. )

HOWEVER.
If you write your title as "Miller & Coors" then a search for "Miller and Coors" will NOT match.
So.. I would say the better way is to use "and" in YOUR titles and not & because you then will get picked up by the people that type "Miller and Coors".

But for search, if you want more results, use & (or, since & is ignored, just do away with it.)

Of course, they *COULD* Tweak it back to MySQL Default 4 character search, which would then get the same search results if you type "Mills & Boon" or "Mills and Boon" because then both "And" and "&" are ignored.

However, as I recall this was from a LONG time back that people had requested the search be enabled to search on 3 letter words , so, switching back to 4 letters minimum would break a functionality that I am sure most ebidders have actually been happy with!

Boy, I'm glad I'm not Gazza! LOL! What a headache.

[lofty100e]

I have not listed on here for sometime now, so things may have changed; but there used to be a place where you could log key words for the listing. Surely if you include both ampersand and and it will catch on the searches?

[bunsock]

I think it might be better if search was amended to automatically ignore "and". Then if someone searched "Mills & Boon" or "Mills and Boon", it would actually search for "Mills Boon" and find all of them.