searching within words?

[davidmouse]

I have recently build a site which uses Zoom as it's search system and it seems to work well .. I was wondering though, as the client highlighted this when I saw her a couple of days ago, if the system can find parts of words?

example .. searches on 'pre-clean' and 'pre clean' both return pages. But the pages I would want to find, which contain the term 'pre-clean' can be returned only with the specific search for 'pre-clean'. If I just put 'pre' nothing is found and a search for 'all words' on 'pre clean' delivers pages with 'clean' in the text, but no pages with the 'pre-' prefix.

I know I can add synonyms manually, and I know the user might think cleverly enough to perhaps stick an asterisk in the search .. but is this the only way? .. or is there something I am missing? is there any 'close match' facility or 'sounds like' available .. ? or is this coming in v5?

I'd appreciate any advice.

David

[David]

The spelling suggestions offered by Zoom are in fact a sounds like search. But doing a sounds like search wouldn't solve this problem 'pre' and 'pre-clean' don't really sound the same at all.

So yes, you could do a wild card search, you could add synonyms, or you can add meta data to the page to include all word variants. Any of these solutions would work.

You could also try turning off the '-' as a word join character. This might improve results for this particular search

[davidmouse]

thanks

ok, that sounds fine ... i just didn't want to have overlooked something silly. I'll have a go switching the hyphen word link off and see what happens.

apart from this oddity, it is working very nicely and Ms Client is very pleased.

thanks for prompt response.

D