Multi Field Search Form

[Raidfire]

Hi

I'm trying to create a multi field search form, the site is for a real estate agent so I need to create an advanced search form including "property type", "number of bedrooms", "location" etc. I've created a search page with each field named as "zoom_query" but the result is some thing like the following.

www.xyz.com/search.php?zoom_query=4+bedroom&zoom_query=house

Zoom only searches on the last field ie in this case house. How do I consolodate the fields so I get something to the effect of...

www.xyz.com/search.php?zoom_query=4+bedroom+house

I'm new to search engines so any help pointing me in the right direction would be appreciated, I've tried changing things in the javascript and php files to no avail.

Cheers

Jay

[David]

Zoom V5 works like Google. It searches all the text on web pages and Office documents.

Zoom doesn't know anything about number of bedrooms, etc..

As an example, a search for "4" would return pages that contain the text
"4 Large Bedrooms"
"Address 4 Main Street"
"4 flights of stairs"
"6 bedrooms and 4 bathrooms"
"Could have 4 bedrooms with an extension"
"4 bedrooms downstairs and 3 more upstairs"

So it is never going to give the exact results you want, you really need a full database. That is the bad news.

The good news is that we re developing a solution to exactly this issue in V6 of the software. V6 will allow you to do a multi-crietia search like what you are asking for.

If you contact us in a couple of weeks we might have a alpha or beta release of V6 with this feature for you to test.

[Raidfire]

Thanks

Thanks for the help. In the mean time is there a way for me to consolodate the search fields togeather to create 1 long search string? ie 4+bedroom+house+55000euro+bulgaria

I'd be happy to upload what i've got to a demo server and allow an administrator to look at my search page and code. And I'd be more than happy to help test any alpha or beta products.

Cheers

Jay

[David]

To create a long search string, you would need to write some Javascript code that collected the values the user has selected from the various fields on your search form and then build up a URL with the values concatenated together.

This might be a few hours work depending on the complexity of your form. And I think the relevancy of the search results would be so so even after you got your form working.