Improving X-Cart's Search

After dealing with X-Cart more and more on a daily basis one aspect it is lacking in is the search capabilities.

We've all used google or yahoo search at one point in time. Compare how friendly Google's results are compared to X-Cart's. You'll notice a significant amount of difficulty finding what your looking for.

Here are some ideas I've put together on how to perhaps improve X-Cart's ability to search properly. Normalize all product names and descriptions (get string length on descr,fulldescr to decide which to index with); Remove Punctuation [!@#.] and HTML/JS [<(.*).>]; Convert [1-9] to word counterpart [one-nine]; Use OR Logic to split the search substring into parts to compare other possible results; Suggesting Keywords that may have more relevancy on small amount of results; Dictionary spell checker with the ability to custom tailor entries; Use MySQL fulltext field type instead of TEXT field type on the `xcart_products` table.

Why fulltext fields? Because they offer a lot more possibilities than VARCHAR to offer more accurate results to the customer. Such as built-in stop words and booleans, which ultimately improve the reliability that a potiental customer is searching upon.

More Information on fulltext searching:
MySQL Docs on fulltext searching

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