Steven Zahm@ Mike
re: Searching for “510” versus “(510)” yields are different set of search results.
This is not surprising as they are completely different strings.
How is your search setup (Connections : Settings admin page, Search tab)? What fields are you letting the search, search? Just the phone numbers? If is more than just the phone numbers, results from the other fields will also be included.
Something else will influence results too…
The string (510) is 5 characters. The a FULLTEXT search would be applied so you would get weighted results that would include both (510) and 510. If no results are found with a FULLTEXT query, then it’ll try a LIKE query. Following the same rules as explained in the next paragraph the with exception of the results being returned will be those that start with (510). This would not include any results for 510 because that is not what is being search for for by the user.
The string 510 is 3 characters the database will not perform a FULLTEXT search with just 3 characters. There’s nothing I can do about that. What happens instead, Connections will fallback to a LIKE query. This will return results that begin with 510 and not (510 because that is not what is being search for by the user.
All that said… I really do not have any recommendations other than maybe you could create predefined links that search by area code. The link would really be true areacode searches but it would provide your users constant results since they would be searching for the same string.
Hope that helps!