This poses a couple problems:

1. It can confuse users with unnecessary options
2. It’s pretty meaningless.

Why would someone come to your web site to search other web sites? Read more about Search Usability at Jakob Nielsen’s web site. If they’re going to add this “scope” feature of site and web, then they should at least make it so when you’re on the Results page, and you click the “Web” radio button, it automatically takes their query to web results. But you shouldn’t include the web as a scope anyway. People go to major search engine web sites. In fact, they probably found your site on a search engine in the first place.

Now, if DotNetNuke wants to make their search functionality better, they should do some things to improve the results:

1. They should increase the search scope to a LIKE instead of an exact string match
1. From Jakob Nielsen:

Overly literal search engines reduce usability in that they’re unable to handle typos, plurals, hyphens, and other variants of the query terms.

2. They should allow for the creation of a dictionary (or use the Google Search API) to assist with common spelling mistakes.
3. The Results Page should be configurable to show page names instead of module titles.

Those are just a few things that would make DNN search better. What do you think?

OK — here is where the actual change is:

——————–

AND (sw.Word like ‘%’ + @Word + ‘%’)

AND (t.IsDeleted = 0)

AND (t.DisableLink = 0)

AND (m.IsDeleted = 0)

AND (t.PortalID = @PortalID)

OR (m.ModuleTitle like ‘%’ + @Word + ‘%’)

———–

The bolded lines are the changes

First line is how the search term is matched. Instead of exact, it does a like. We found that a lot of clients would complain that searching “map”, for instance, would not return pages which had the word “maps” on them. Or “auto” won’t give you “automobile”.

Second is the disablelink line. We had the problem of hidden pages showing up in results but realized sometimes we WANT hidden pages to show up, but sometimes we hide pages because they’re not ready to be published. So I decided that if I “disable” the page then I definitely don’t want it to come up in the results, but I might want to keep it for later (we aren’t much for deleting pages around here)

Third is the OR m.ModuleTitle like ‘%’ + @Word + ‘%’ part — now this is kind of a subjective one. I have a web site right now for a client that sells insurance. Home insurance, life insurance, and car insurance. When I searched “car” I didn’t get the car insurance page at all, even though the page was titled car insurance and the module was titled car insurance… The content copy used the word “automobile” because this particular client is very traditional and was picky about that wording. So I added the “OR” line because if we put the search term in the title, it’s most likely relevant. We know module titles are what show up as the links on the SRP and so we make sure those titles are always relevant and helpful for the user.

BUT — we would like to see page name or page title as an option in the settings for how the text displays. we couldn’t figure out how to modify the core to do that.

OK that is all i hope this has been informational