I just played around with different feeds to learn more about the capabilities of Price Tapestry.
Sorting the results by relevance is very important feature in my opinion and so I would like to know, which function determines the relevance of a product and how this function can be manipulated.
For example:
I imported some "tech feeds" and wanted to search for "Macbook Pro" by relevance. The first five results consisted of adapters and display covers in my case because these products use the phrase "Macbook Pro" in their title and in their description. The real relevant products just followed up later on, because their description consists of plain technical terms.
I guess there is no better way to auto-analyze the relevance of products but it would be very usefull to "blacklist" or tier some products not to display as first results.
Is there any way to do so?
Best regards and thank you in advance, David!
Bernhard
Hi David,
thanks for your reply.
I will give your proposal a try although this isn't exactly what I was looking for :)
Maybe this could be a feature in a future version of PT, where we could exclude specific products the way we select the featured ones in the backend right now.
In my opinion this could be usefull for other cases as well...
Best regards
Bernhard
Hi Bernhard,
One possibility would be to set a flag in the products table that a product has been mapped (via Product Mapping) - you wouldn't necessarily have to use the Product Mapping feature at all - the alternatives box could be left blank on the configuration page for a mapping; but this way you could "tell" the database that a particular product - if matched for the query should be promoted... would that sound feasible for your niche?
Cheers,
David.
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PriceTapestry.com
Hi David,
I guess it would be too difficult to promote certain products in my case.
Maybe I should try the "drop records" filter to get rid of the products which "mess up" my result pages.
Best regards
Bernhard
Hello Bernhard,
The relevancy sorting is based on MySQL's full text indexing relevancy; however there is a caveat on which you stumbled in your test which is that the full text index search method is only used where all words in the query are > 3 characters in length (as words under 4 characters are not included in a full text index).
If you are building a predominantly high value niche site one option would be to make the basic search method order by descending price by default; which is easy to do. To try this, look for the following code at line 53 of search.php:
$orderByDefault["rating"] = "rating DESC";...and REPLACE with:
$orderByDefault["relevance"] = "minPrice DESC";$orderByDefault["rating"] = "rating DESC";
Most queries - where all keywords are > 3 characters will still sort by MySQL's relevance computation - the above will only take effect for queries that don't trigger use of the full text index and use the basic search method instead.
Hope this helps!
Cheers,
David.
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PriceTapestry.com