No sorting for search results?

Hi Chris,

When you search it orders results in order of the search queries, if it ordered them in any other way it would not give proper search results. Please check Yelp, TripAdvisor etc, you can’t sort by other options when u perform a search.

I don’t really understand the second part of your question, can you provide an example or explain what you mean more?

Thanks,

Stiofan

Hi Chris,

We are talking about the same thing,
Do a search for “potatoes” on tripadvisor and you get no sort options:
https://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/Search?geo=&pid=3825&redirect=&startTime=1485626081955&uiOrigin=MASTHEAD&q=potatoes&returnTo=https%253A__2F____2F__www__2E__tripadvisor__2E__co__2E__uk__2F__&searchSessionId=C23288DE8D3EF468D4E4AB430979C0CB1485626078341ssid#&ssrc=a&o=0

The results are already sorted by your exact search phrase, it gives a weight to certain things like x10 if in title, x5 if in category or tag x3 if in description, results would not make sense if you sorted by anything other than the search, thats why tripadvisor does not have it either. It has been discussed many times here.

For Near search, if you type in “Berlin” and dont click the suggestions and search then it will get the center of Berlin by GPS and then order all results by distance to that center.

If you click on of the suggestion it will set the location as that an it will limit all results to that location but order by the Search term, also this will then limit the entire site to that location only.
The region berlin i am not sure is correct, what is the correct region for berlin?

Stiofan

Hi Chris,

Let me explain why almost no one does what you want in search:

If you search for say “Mexican Food” you would get results for “mexican food”, “mexican” and “food” the search will sort these by relevance as i explained above. if you then sorted by “highest rated” then you might get a result that did not match “mexican” but ONLY matched “food” and it might be a French “food” place that has nothing to do with mexican food and thus would be almost pointless. I hope that explains the problem, if you have a solution i am happy to listen as am an sure TripAdvisor are too 🙂

Stiofan

I was trying to figure out how to sort search results and came across this thread. I hope it’s okay that I add a reply.

My understanding is that it is your position that sorting on search results could result in unwanted results to sort to the top of a list. I’d like to argue against this way of thinking about sort.

The ability to sort search results can be VERY beneficial, even if the sort includes some irrelevant results moving to the top. It’s much more of a benefit to at least have the option to sort than to have not option. And with an option to sort, the initial sort order can still be based on Relevance. Furthermore, if an end user doesn’t like the results of changing to another type of sort (for example Price or Rating) they can always switch back to the Relevance sort. Having the option to sort search results does not mean that everyone needs to use that option.

With that said, even TripAdvisor allows sorting. Not for the example you gave, potatoes, but certainly they allow it for Hotels, Restaurants….. If I search for Hotels in Chicago I get this:

So…. while I can’t sort a result for potatoes, I can sort a result for Hotels.

Please consider allowing for sort of search results. Almost all directories allow for search sort.

NEXT…… I believe that the way search was described above in this thread is incorrect. It was stated:

If you search for say “Mexican Food” you would get results for “mexican food”, “mexican” and “food” the search will sort these by relevance as i explained above.

To put it in search terms, it sounds like GeoDirectory uses an OR search…. Except it doesn’t.

I gave this a try and created three listings. The listings had different keywords that I would search:

Listing 1 – Authentic stuff at it’s best
Listing 2 – Authentic Mexican at it’s best
Listing 3 – Authentic Mexican stuff at it’s best

Each of these listings had the tag “food”, so I started by searching on food near Denver to pull up a listing of all three to take a screen grab:

I then searched for the words Mexican stuff. If it’s an OR search (Mexican OR stuff) I should still see all three search results. Here’s what I got:

That’s not right – it’s the result of either an AND search or an EXACT MATCH search.

So is GeoDirectory doing AND searches or EXACT MATCH searches? Searching for stuff Mexican should answer this question.

If it’s an OR search (stuff OR Mexican) it should give 3 results (we already know it won’t).
If it’s an AND search (stuff AND Mexican) it should give 1 result.
If it’s an EXACT MATCH (stuff Mexican) it should give NO results.

Here’s what I get:

No results means Geodirectory is using an EXACT MATCH search.

I reviewed the documentation on the search feature (https://wpgeodirectory.com/docs/gd-search/) an there is no mention on how to set a search type (OR, AND, EXACT MATCH). Perhaps this is something that can be addressed? It would be great it power users could search any of those (using AND, OR, and quotes for EXACT MATCH) or if there were radio buttons or something. It could be a perfect addition to the Advanced Search plugin!

FINALLY….. Looping back to the issue of being able to sort search results. As indicated, even TripAdvisor allows sorting of results (within specific types – Hotels, Restaurants….) It would be very valuable to have sort options in GeoDirectory, especially for sites that are listing things like hotels and restaurants. The ability to a search of Hotels in a specific area by rating is invaluable. While there are other ways for users to get to a sortable list without using search, people are trained on using search (and then sorting the results).

Having the option to sort results does not mean that the user needs to use that option, or if they do use it, that they can’t re-sort back to relevance, or that a particular site developer needs to enable the sort option. But it would make GeoDirectory that much more powerful.

Please let me know if I missed something on the type of search that GeoDirectory is doing. Sounds like it should be doing OR searches, but it is clearly doing EXACT MATCH searches. BTW, I tested this on your demo and it too seems to be EXACT MATCH:

Several listings in Philadelphia had either Asian or Food in them. In fact, some non-restaurant listings had the word food in it and when I did a search for “food” the 4th result was for the Sadsbury Woods Preserve, not the most relevant result. And while sorting probably wouldn’t make it any more relevant (unless you could sort on a specific type, like restaurants) it does show that non-sortable search results doesn’t necessarily mean more relevant results.

Anyway, apologies for the length of my post. I’m loving GeoDirectory and hope this is of some help! And if there is some way for me to easily switch to an OR based search I’d like to know.

Thanks!

@chris If you want to help with GD UI/UX improvements we will be all ears, we encourage and listen to our customers, if you have some nice examples we can talk it over on skype if you would like?

@key i think what would solve your problems is if we had a autocomplete in the search filed that included categories, so instead of going to the search page it would take you to the category page where results could then be sorted?

Stiofan

Ha! I just took a look at tripadvisor and I love the way they do it! The icons really make it clear that they are selectable! I’d say that’s the way to go!