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Magento is the leading e-commerce platform rapidly gaining in popularity. This magento discussion was started by Vann 0n February 05 2008

A good search engine on a product’s support site is vital to people’s ability to find solutions to their problems, keeps redundant forum traffic down, and can reduce workloads for staff and users who otherwise spend time asking and answering the same questions when search fails or frustrates them. Searching a product’s support site is often the first and last method of “support” that many users have or are willing to make, and is therefore all the more important to encourage product adoption.

Here are a few improvement ideas:

1. Don’t use Google Search; use a search that accesses your database backend. The frustration of using Google Search is obvious when searching for “Paypal IPN”, for example. Google Search indexes hundreds of (expired) pages that contain the “Latest Blog Post” block, each with links to a single entry: “Video: Paypal Website Payment Standard”. A builtin CMS search would search database content, not generated pages, and produce a far more concise listing of matching results. Using Google Search in place of a homegrown search shifts the burden of finding results to the user; I find it’s often faster to browse the website than to search through hundreds of duplicate Google Search hits for a unique match that might prove relevant.

2. Moreoever, search often returns multiple matches that link to the same exact page. I suggest testing the URLs of matching results for uniqueness against each other. (for an example of this, again see http://www.magentocommerce.com/search/results/?q=paypal+ipn , multiple search results link to this page: http://www.magentocommerce.com/blog/comments/paypal-website-payment-standard-ipn )

3. The post date of content isn’t returned. This should at least be displayed with the match. Even better would be to allow sorting by date. Whenever a new feature’s released, I find myself searching for instructions. I’d like to sort matching results by “newest”, and not sort through tens of old and irrelevant search results of forums posts from 2007 of users, say, requesting the feature. I find myself performing this tedious task often.

4. Obviously, an advanced search that allows logical constructors, quotes, and category restricted (knowledge base, wiki, etc) searches would be awesome.

5. Allow users to “rate” matches. Then return highly rated matches first. Use the collective’s knowledge to help people help each other.

Thanks for a great product, fellahs. But please don’t let a poor search function slow down adoption of such a promising piece of software.

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