Is there any way to include the words that are used as tags in the search criteria? Meaning....

My client is going to be using tagging pretty heavily. It seems intuitive that if they type in a word that is used to tag an entry into the search box, any entry with that tag should be returned with that search result. But, it seems that the tags are not indexed int he search. Is there any way to include them?

Thanks!

Ah yes, this is high on my question list too.

I’m probably not correct here, but if Tag 1.0 used a custom field for it’s tags and stored them in that field, is there any way to tap into that legacy functionality in order to get tags into the search results?

Thanks dude(s).

Tyler,

Get cozy with the embed tag and use that to pull in tags that belong to an entry in your search results.

Woops, maybe I didn’t explain well. I was of the understanding that the EE search module is unable to read the tags associated with an entry, therefore the tags aren’t, um, indexed or searched. Is that not correct?

Mitchell, I don’t get it. :(

I don’t simply want to display the tags associated with an entry in my search results. I want the tags to be one of the fields that search looks in. Let’s say the entry does NOT have the word Frog in it. BUT, we add a tag called Frog, because even though there is no text that says Frog, it has something to do with frogs. When I use the search box, I want to be able to type in Frog, and if there is a tag that is frog associated with an entry, I want the search results to pull it—even if the word exists no where else in the entry. Could just be a picture of a frog.

Now, maybe that is what you were addressing, I don’t know, cause I can’t understand what you meant. Can you explain a bit more?

Righty right.

EE search does not search for tags. Tyler was in fact asking if the custom field for collecting tags can be used to patch this, and I wouldn’t recommend it as it would not be kept up to date.

So at the moment there’s not much we can do as EE does not have extension hooks in the search module to allow us to manipulate.

I will say one thing here though. When you execute a search, your search terms are stored in the DB. We could get those terms from the DB and use them on the search results template, but that’s patchy too.

mk

Suggestion: a new preference to turn on tag duplication/synchronization in a custom field. You could then specify which custom field you want to use (after creating it), then the tag forms could add just one more UPDATE query to synch the tags to the custom field.

Thanks Tyler. It will confuse people though because I want the tab tag field to be authoritative. People will try to use the tag field and wonder why their tags are not being sucked up.

Good point. Perhaps it could be a very special feature not to be trifled with unless one is dead sure they need tags to be in search results.

Any response on my categories and tags question?

Evoir - 17 September 2007 01:47 PM

Mitchell, I don’t get it. :(

I don’t simply want to display the tags associated with an entry in my search results. I want the tags to be one of the fields that search looks in. Let’s say the entry does NOT have the word Frog in it. BUT, we add a tag called Frog, because even though there is no text that says Frog, it has something to do with frogs. When I use the search box, I want to be able to type in Frog, and if there is a tag that is frog associated with an entry, I want the search results to pull it—even if the word exists no where else in the entry. Could just be a picture of a frog.

Now, maybe that is what you were addressing, I don’t know, cause I can’t understand what you meant. Can you explain a bit more?

So Evoir, what Mitchell is saying is that this isn’t possible right now. You might want to hack the module (is that okay to say here?) to add (a) line(s) at the end of tag functions to synchronize the tags and a custom field that you setup in your regular EE. Not very likely supportable by Solspace though.

Evoir: you may also want to look at implementing a Google Site Search that indexes the final output of your pages. If you include tags in the metakeywords and as header tags, Google should be able to provide quite accurate results, albeit slightly delayed.

EDIT: you can decrease the delay by implementing a proper [rul=http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/]Google sitemap[/url] however.

Hmmm..... Thanks Mitchell and Wonder Monkey. Yeah, this kinda sucks. I can’t use google (I don’t think so, anyway) as these are private blogs etc.... and google can’t get into see the data. And I can’t hack the module, because well, I don’t know how to. It makes no sense to me that the Tags are not indexed in the search function.....

Thanks Tyler. It will confuse people though because I want the tab tag field to be authoritative. People will try to use the tag field and wonder why their tags are not being sucked up.

You know, I find the tab confusing… for what it is worth. When I am making an entry, I would much rather just fill out an additional field called tags rather than have to hit a tab. I’ve implemented Tags in Movable Type with some plugin and it returned a search result....

I don’t see why Tags have to have a tab, and why a custom field is not the way to go with this. If it were stored in a custom field, wouldn’t it be natively searched by the database as well?

And, if you want the “tag field to be authoritative”, not having it indexed in the search makes it much less authoritative, doesn’t it? Let’s say in EE blog, you post a picture, and you tag it. Someone uses the search box and cannot find things that you tagged.

Anyway, just sharing my thoughts. I very much appreciate the help.

Another solution would be to write a little cron job that adds those tags to a custom field every few hours or something.

Can you write plugins? You might write a plugin to do this for you whenever your tags are added. Actually i might go do this right now…

Me can’t write plugins. Me can barely USE plugins.

Then I think you might want to just explain the limitations of tagging to your client.

Ugh. It just makes no sense to me. tagging is it’s own, isolated experience. I sold them on the tagging, since I had done a site in MT and the tagging was totally integrated. Just assumed it would be in EE as well. It was the main selling point on the site. Kinda frustrating. Looking at it from a users perspective, they should not be separate systems. But, yeah. I see the limitation…