Handling searches for a symbol (! in a word)

[pebraham]

Our marketing department, in their wisdom, have decided that a a good name for a product is xxxx!.
Not its real name of course, but the ! in the name is real, so users are searching for xxxx! and can't find any references to it,thoug a search for xxxx works.

What would you suggest I do?

I don't have access to all the pages that have the product name in.

I would happily sacrifice another of the possible joining letters (such as underscore) to be able to use !.

Pete

[David]

We treat the exclamation mark as punctuation!

But what should happen is that the search script strips this character from the search words. So a search for xxxxx! and xxxxx should return the same result.

We'll have a deeper look.

Are you using the PHP, ASP, Javascript, ASPX or CGI option?

[pebraham]

Yes - I would have thought ! would be stripped off before the search, but I checked again just now and a search for xx! didn't work.

We're using ASP.

Thanks
Peter

[pebraham]

It occurred to me that xxxx, which is a false identity - was a 2 letter word in the skipped words list.
However I removed the word from the skipped list and the search for xx! still doesn't work.

Pete

[Ray]

There's a min. word length setting under "Skip options", which says "Skip words less than x characters".

But if this is the case, then when you search for the word, it should be telling you that it is a word in the skip list or something similar.

What is the actual message you see? Maybe you can point us to the search page and the pages in question (and the actual word). You can e-mail us for privacy.

[pebraham]

Hi

I've sent you an email with our web site and search terms, but you get something similar if you use the search button on this forum.

Use the search form at the top of the forum page and compare searches for:
no
no.
no!

The first two are fine, but the last one returns no results.
Pete

[Ray]

Confirmed that the current release (V6.0 build 1027) is not handling exclamation marks properly in the search query.

This has been fixed and will be included in the accumulative changes for the next release V6.0 build 1028

Pete - check your email, as I've sent you a patch update in the mean time.

[pebraham]

Thanks

Thanks for your rapid repsonse. It works fine now.
Pete