Use of question mark in exact phrase

[Vernon]

I have a bookshop site where the default search is for exact phrases. If I search for the title "Does anybody love me" on lion.testweb.co.uk, it brings up a result. But the phrase "Does anybody love me?" (which is the correct title of the book, complete with final ?) does not.

I know that wildcards (* and ?) are not supported in exact phrases. Is the ? being interpreted as a wildcard character here? If so, how do I search for phrases that end with a question mark as this is what the user may well type?

(My current solution is to add to the meta keywords for the page a version of the book title stripped of any non A-Z, 0-9 characters and to do the same for the search string before submission.)

Thanks

[David]

I had a look at your site. You don't appear to be using our software, or if you are then it is a highly customised version of of our code.

For example, we don't offer any option to select exact phrase to be on all the time as a default. So your issue would not be encountered in our generic software.

Wildcards are not supported in exact phrases. So no, the ? is not being interpreted as a wildcard character. In fact it will try to do an exact match against the question mark, but as this punction is stripped during the indexing process, there won't be any matches.

[Vernon]

I'm using 5.1 (1003). Our need for exact phrase matching is implemented by the ASP enclosing the user's search phrase within quote marks before passing it to the Zoom CGI. The results are returned as XML so that we can control how the final page is formatted. Having found a set of results, we also use the Zoom link to query our products database so we can retrieve additional information (an additional process I guess your version 6 meta tags will remove the necessity for).

Yes, at present we are stripping out any final ? (and then adding the enclosing quotes) as we were not finding matches when we left it in. So I'm still puzzled as to why we only get a match when we strip out the ?.

[Ray]

The answer is that you can't really search for a question mark or punctuation, unless it is part of the "Indexing word rules" (on the "Indexing Options" tab) and a question mark is not a supported rule since we use it in our search syntax.

Given that you are already using a cuztomised ASP front-end to the Zoom CGI, it would seem like the most obvious solution would be to have your front-end strip the question mark from the query before passing it to Zoom. It sounds like you've done this, so I'll assume that there is no longer a problem?

Having said that, you might be interested in the Custom Meta Fields feature in the upcoming V6 release. You can specify a field type for book titles as a Text field which will work as exact match (or substring), and since wildcards are not used here, you can actually search for a question mark and other punctuation.

See this thread for more information on V6 and the Fruits-R-Us demo (although this example doesn't feature any text fields to search for).

[Vernon]

Sorting by version 6 meta tags

Thanks, Raymond. Yes, I'll strip out the ? in search phrases in my ASP before submitting them.

...and I'll await with anticipation version 6 so I can use the meta tags. I can see this will be a real boon for folk like us who are indexing databases by exporting the data to HTML pages. We will be able to include database fields very easily. (By the way, I still think - as content management systems become ever common - that it would be a great development of your product to allow an SQL query to generate indexing points. ADODB/ODBC could grab the text to be indexed rather than reading HTML from the file system or HTTP.)

Now what I then really, really want to do is re-sort the search results using those version 6 meta tags. So at the moment, we can turn on "re-sort by date". If I have a meta tag "price" in my version 6, I want to be able to sort my results "By ascending/descending price". We currently have a client who needs just this: given a list of 500 products in the search results, which are the cheapest? At the moment, so solve this I will have to read the complete XML output for all 500 (but display only the first 10), locate the links back to the products, query the database for just those matching products but sorted by price.

Any chance of sneaking this in for version 6? Please!

[Ray]

We've already gone to beta for V6, so the feature list is pretty much locked now. Realize of course that the more we try to add things that people ask, the longer it takes for us to get to a public release.

We have considered the possibility of sorting by custom meta fields before, but it wasn't high on our list as no one had asked for it. However, it would be something we'll consider for V6.1 if there's enough interest.