Is there a way to change the search behavior for k2?

We are using k2mart for a large office supply companies catalog. Their products are all a combination of three letters and three numbers separated by a dash.

For example ABC-123.

When you do a search for ABC-123 you get all product results for any product that is also ABC or 123.

For example
ABC-567
JKH-123
etc. Usually with the exact search you are looking for not the top result on the list. I suspect this is because the dash is ignored during the search?

Is there a way to change(hack if necessary) this behavior?

Thanks.

Comon, BUMP?

Is there a way to modify the k2 search module so that searches are always "verbatim" aka wrapped in quotes

Transparently of course.

Looking at this string in the search .php of the k2 tools module...
SO assuming $text is the imput string, how can I enclose it in quotes? I tried doing "$text" at all instances but that seemed to do nothing. Im guessing this is because php interperets the quotes as php syntax? I know next to nothing about php so any help would be appreciated.

Hi. K2 search operates like Google: if you put your search in double quotes it will search for exact matches.

Yes, I am aware of that - what I would like to do is alter the component so that all searches are verbatim, e.g.. in quotes so that the process is transparent for the end user.

If you would read my first post you would know that due to the nature of the k2 item names that search is not functioning ideally for our situation.

You cannot do this. Maybe you can add quotes with javascrip when user hits the search button. Regarding the results, K2 uses MySQL full text indexing. This by default is indexing words of 4 letters or more. If you need to change this you have to configure MySQL accordingly.

I already set text indexing in mysql to 3 letters and rebuilt the index, however I don't see how that is relative to the issue either, there has to be some way to not ignore the dashes in search!

For instance before we moved to k2mart and were using just virtuemart the default virtuemart search module did NOT ignore the dashes, you could enter an exact product number and the search result would be the exact product you entered.

I just want to post again to make this crystal clear. All I want is the ability for search to NOT IGNORE hyphens.

I know that this has to be possible, for example on my site I installed another search component, RSSearch, and it doesnt ignore hyphens - however it doesnt use the k2 generic template for search results and doesnt show the k2 image so it is not ideal for me.

Currently there is no other way than using the quotes. MySQL fulltext search uses the hyphen as a special character. Since you do need this feature modify the K2 code to fit your needs. I assume that we are talking about K2 search. If you can live with Joomla! search you can make a plugin and behave as you want. In that case you can copy the existing K2 search plugin, modify it and disable the original.

Paul,

What was your solution for exact match searching?

I have extra fields with a dash in the value so I also need all searches to be exact match.