Make Your Joomla Site Search More User Friendly

As Microsoft will tell you, one of the hardest things in the world to get right is search. 

Neither Simple Machines, Drupal or Joomla have acheived really satisfying search results. In fact I’ll often go outside of the Joomla forums and search them using Google because the results are more relevant than SMF’s own answers. Its not surprising – Google emply 1000s of people to get their results right. Open Source projects don’t have that luxury.

 

Currently if you search a Joomla site using default search module and component, "Food Hamburgers" will return all pages with either "Food" or "Hamburgers".

search-all-words.png

This isn’t particularly useful because people would prefer to see pages with both. Zorro, a regular and wise commenter on this blog has come up with a neat little hack available here at www.nitsche.org. Download it, save it as mod_search.php, backup your existing mod_search.php and upload this instead. Now, when people search your site, Joomla will use the "all words" search by default. 

More Usability Hacks

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *