Hello everyone - I hope you’re all doing well! I’m wondering if anyone has any ideas/recommendations on a problem I’m trying to solve. I have a client who has a list of companies in a custom module. Each company sells different types of products, but not on the client’s site. On the client’s site, they just have a listing with the company name, logo, and a description. I also created a ‘keywords’ custom field so that the client can add relevant keywords that may not be found in the name and/or description field.
I’m wondering if there is a way to manipulate Treepl’s built-in site search to look for synonyms, similar terms, and maybe even misspellings so that the company will appear if there is a typo or similar term in the search. For example, if someone is looking for a men’s t-shirt and types in one of the following:
men’s tshirt, mens t-shirt, men’s blue tshirt, etc.
Is there a way to have a company that lists a ‘men’s t-shirt’ in their keywords and/or description if they don’t use the exact term or phrase? Does that make sense? If not, is anyone aware of a third-party platform that can be embedded on a Treepl CMS site that can do the same thing - and here’s the catch: without ads? Even if it’s a tool that has a subscription fee, I think my client would be willing to pay the fee to have this functionality embedded on their site to search the companies.
Also, regarding Treepl’s built-in search, you don’t need a custom field for extra keywords (and this actually won’t work with the regular keyword search field anyway). There is a system field called ‘Site Search Keywords’ where you can add other keywords or variations (comma-separated).
I just realised that Google Site Search has ads (should have known ).
However, the site I linked to above has their own paid site search tool which looks like it may achieve most of your goals:
Thank you for responding here! Yes, unfortunately (but not surprisingly) it looks like Google’s search will display ads, which the client told me is a hard ‘no’. I actually sort of inherited this project and it does look like the ‘Keyword’ field is the system ‘Site Search Keywords’ and not a custom field (apologies for the confusion on my part!). I did come across the same Expertrec article that you shared here and gave that some thought - but before I recommend we test out the Expertrec search, I just wanted to make sure that I wasn’t missing out on some obvious solution using the built-in site search Treepl module. While the Site Search Keywords field is a great place to put all potential keywords, I’m just not sure that is scalable enough of a solution for them. They have almost a thousand companies and each company sells a huge variety of products and I just don’t think they have the bandwidth to add every single possible keyword and then also the synonyms and possible misspellings. I’m hoping we can find a solution that offers a site search that has that kind of intelligence built in. Maybe Expertrec is the way to go! I will recommend we give that a try and if they decide to have me play around with it, I’ll report back here and let everyone know how it works in case anyone has a similar situation. I just wanted to make sure there wasn’t a built-in feature that had that sort of search intelligence. I know it’s kind of a big ask, but wanted to check here first to make sure I wasn’t missing the obvious.
Thank you again, I really appreciate you jumping in here and offering your help!