Do you add a search-wide term/keywords in your site’s Admin ‘Setup’ tab? I don’t do this and don’t usually have the problem you are mentioning.

FYI – If people are using your search and most searches are made using your home page, or you are using the basic search option, then results are based on whatever keywords/phrases you entered in your site’s home page (found in the ‘Content’ tab in Admin).

You bring up a good point regarding the blank results for Mark’s search results mod, but I don’t think this is the cause of the blank results. The site where I have the most blank results is on my My Little Pony site. I haven’t seen any examples of no results showing for searches.

Rochelle

Has anyone solved the problem of the search box function, which is more or less useless if you use search queries to build your pages? I cannot see how you can build a site without using search queries and many of my sites I’ve built by creating each store page, rather than using ebay categories.

When a search is made on the site, the search query is included with whatever term is searched and therefore, more often than not, no results are returned. I first noticed this on my golf shoes site. If you search for “golf boots” (without the quotes) there will be no results, even though there clearly are boots, as I have a specific page for them in the index. The reason is that the search actually made by the system is “golf shoes golf boots” and this brings no results.

You can check the actual search term submitted by putting in your search term, obtain your results then click through to ebay on the “view more items at ebay” link and it will show you the search that was actually made. I just wonder how many visitors search, get no results and move on somewhere else? I also saw your question on Mark’s Forum about having 50 blank searches and I’m wondering if the above is the reason?

If anyone knows the answer to this, I would be grateful to hear from you.

Denise

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