Search Suggestions

[praveennair]

hello,

This is Praveen Nair from Aptara Corp.com. I am using a PHP version of zoom search and my query is how can I increase the search suggestions? Right now i am getting only three words with link, seperated with "or" option.

Example:

Search results for: "medipal" in all categories

No pages were found containing your keyword.

Did you mean to search for: metaplastic or midpalmar or metaplasia?

How can I increase the search suggestions? I tried create one more variable named "$word4" and try to print; it didnt worked out.

Also how can i get more relevant search suggestion?

right now i am not getting the accurate suggestions.

Lets have a look at what i get when i searched a word "gail"

Search results for: "gail" in all categories

No pages were found containing your keyword.

Did you mean to search for: cool or clue or glue?

is there any way to improve this?

regards

[Ray]

You can not increase the number of search suggestions made. Changing the script won't help because it would also require changes within the Indexer. As you are the first person to ask for more than 3 suggestions, it is not something we are considering to change at this point.

We use a phonetic algorithm known as metaphones to determine spelling suggestions. It is not perfect (no algorithm is), but it allows us to provide suggestions without sticking a massive dictionary file on your server (which would not work well anyway, as many websites use words not in the English dictionary - e.g. slang, technical terms, etc.). Also, unlike Google, it is not practical for most of our users to have a search script which stores statistics from visitors and have it "learn" suggestions. It is unlikely you would have the server resources (or large enough audience) for something like that to be feasible.

So given these limitations, this algorithm allows Zoom to make suggestions based on words it has found on your website. Unfortunately, there are some unlikely words which share the same metaphone code (as you have found), but we have found the accuracy to be better than most.

[David]

Using recommended links can also help return the right results if there are words on your site that are commonly misspelled.

You can also include misspellings into page meta data to help the engine return the best page.