MAIAN SCRIPT WORLD

I've had Maian Search on my site for a few months now, and though I'm still in the process of building the search engine I've found that this script is superior to two paid search scripts I've used on my other sites in the past.  Amazing work, and thanks for making it available free of charge.

Just a couple of issues, only one of them is causing any problems.

The issue that's causing problems is that there appears to be no way of searching for multiple search terms in a single search.  My site is a fiction and poetry site, so if a reader wanted to find, for example, a historical romance story, searching for historical romance brings up all stories that contain either "historical" or "romance" in their keywords, in their description or in their title.  Is there a way to adapt the software to:

1. Allow specific searches for specific two word phrases - e.g. "historical romance"?

2. Introduce an "AND" function so if someone wanted to find results that contain two unconnected keywords - e.g. "romance" and "war" - they will get only those works that contain both keywords, not either/or and both.

The second issue isn't a major problem, as I've found a workaround, but when you type in the description into the "Page Description" field, if you use speech marks (") then the full text appears on the search page, but if you go back to edit the search entry later everything from the first speech mark is gone from the page description.  For example, if I type into the page description: This is a "test" page, when I go back to edit that page all I see in the page description field is: This is a.

Finally, and it's not an issue for me as I've found a workaround but it might be a useful addition for future versions, would it be possible to add a function to allow custom data to be included in the search results.  For example, I'm using Maian Search as a search engine for an online fiction library.  I enter the story title into the "Page Title" field, the link into the "Page URL" field, and the story summary into the "Page Description" field, but there is nowhere to include other data like the genre, the rating, the word count, etc.

Now, I've found a work around for that by adding the following to the "Page Description" field:

<i><b>Summary: </b><p><b>Type: <p>Genre: <p>Status: <p>Rating: <p>Warnings: <p>Word Count: </b></i>

I then just insert the information I want into the right places and this allows for the search results to contain additional lines of text and information, and isn't a huge hassle, but if it would be possible to add a function to allow admins to add custom fields to the search data, this could be a help for others.

Overall, though, this is a fantastic piece of software and considering it's free and most problems have a workaround it's an amazing addition to any site.  As I say, the only issue I can't seem to fix is the one regarding searches for multiple words or phrases, so if there's a solution there I'd be grateful.

Last edited by Rio256 (4 March 2010 14:19:22)