WEBSITE SEARCH

The search bar module on your site is very important to your customer's shopping experience and can help them locate products, brands and categories easily.

For this tool to function properly, there are steps that are run in the background of our database to correctly store your site's product information so that it can be queried later.

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Indexing

There are two functions that the search features performs everyday:

  • a complete index
  • a partial index

Complete Index - Runs once per week and crawls our entire database collecting new keywords for new products and how it fits within your sitemap. 
Partial Index - Runs 4 times a day and updates any products added or updated since the last index.

Product Fields

WSMU offers their clients, a search feature that indexes product fields in this order:

  1. title  (Product Name)
  2. summary (Description)
  3. summary2 (Extended Description)
  4. meta (Meta Description, Title, Keywords)
  5. stockid (Your Stock#)
  6. dealerid (Dealer/Supplier#)
  7. wsmid (automatically input by WSM when product is added)
  8. remarks (Shipping Remarks)
  9. categories (Categories)
  10. tags (Tags)
  11. brand (Brand)
  12. price

Clues/Examples

While the index function will search each of these fields for what the user enters into the search bar, there are some clues to using the search field as well:


    1.  A space is not considered to be a word separator. Any search criteria that contains two words is not treated as two words by the database. For example, suppose we were trying to search for 'book ends'. If I searched for 'book', I would not pull up book ends because 'book ends' is not separated into "book" and "ends" by the database. Rather, it is treated as "bookends."
    2. The more relevant information you have in the meta or tag fields allows for more searchability. For instance, we know you cannot find 'Book Ends' by searching for 'Book', but if you input the words 'Book' and 'Ends' in the tags section then the search bar will find those keywords when it queries your search.