[Mark]

Hi Steve,

I’m running a search for “apple” but it’s bringing up “app” as well?

Cheers
Mark

[Steven Zahm]

@ Mark

Can you please share a link so I can take a look?

Connections uses the same underlying tech to apply searches as WP uses for searching, So search results would be no better or worse than the core WP search.

Things you can do to tweak to get more relevant search results.

Navigate to the Connections Settings admin page and click the Search tab.

• Limit the search fields to the absolute minimum.
• Disable the LIKE option. After you do, do a test search. If you do not get results, then you need to enable the option as the WP install does not support FULLTEXT searching. FULLTEXT will generally return better results sorted by relevance as determined by the database.

Also, search will return results if the term being searched for exists within HTML tags in the bio/nots fields. You can read a more in depth explanation in regards to this in this post to another user. The short version is that this is not a Connections bug or limitation, the same occurs with core WP searches too. The reason is that there is not a way to exclude searching within HTML tags for matched terms.

Hope this helps!

[Mark]

This reply has been marked as private.

[Steven Zahm]

@ Mark

You’ll have to give me exact example because I can not see the issue…

I searched for apple and I receive 16 results. It appears these are primarily being returned because in each of those entries there is a list and that list has a class name of Apple-dash-list. As explained in this post to another user, these will be returned as results because there is no method with exluce HTML class names when performed a search in the WordPress database.

If you do not want these to be returned as results, you’ll have to edit each entry, switch the Notes field to the Text tab and remove class="Apple-dash-list" from the list.

Searching for app returns no results. This is because the [connections] shortcode on the page has the category shortcode option set, limiting the results to these categories category="26,45,69,98,275,304,305,306".

If you do the same search in the admin, you will get 5 results because it is not being limited by category. If you want these same results on the frontend, you will have to remove the category limitation in the shortcode.

Overall, it does appear the search results are correct.

I hope this helps!

[Author]

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