Using Picky for on-site Search

[Neil Gladstone]

Hi, I have a feeling something similar to this question may have been asked before:

We are thinking of using Picky for the shop search that would make it possible to use Picky as the backend for the a the category navigation. For example, if someone searched for scarves under "clothing" it would return knitted scarves, crocheted scarves and other scarves based on information in the title, keywords and description.

Is something like this possible with Picky and would you have any suggestions for how to weight the search to make the answers more
relevant?

If you can point me in the right direction I would appreciate it.

Neil

[Picky / Florian Hanke]

Hi Neil,

Yes, this is possible with Picky.

What I am not sure about is: what is the item that is found? Is it a specific page?

Anyway, not that important. I'll just call it "thing" ;)

If I understand correctly, what you want to do is restrict results to a smaller set when somebody is in a certain category.

So the way to do this in Picky is to index the category with the thing.

Then, when searching, prepend "category:clothing" to a search, with your example "category:clothing scarves".

Picky would then only return scarves which also are in category "clothing".

If you gem install picky, you can run this example in a file, or in your editor:

-----

require 'picky'

Page = Struct.new :id, :category, :title, :keywords, :description

data = Picky::Index.new :pages do

  category :category, partial: Picky::Partial::None.new

  category :title

  category :keywords, tokenize: false, partial: Picky::Partial::None.new

  category :description

end

data.replace Page.new(1, 'scarves', 'Knitted Scarves', ['scarf', 'knit'], 'Usually handmade')

data.replace Page.new(2, 'shirts', 'Printed Shirts', ['shirt', 'print'], 'Multicolor printed')

pages = Picky::Search.new data

results = pages.search 'scarf', 20, 0

puts results

puts results.allocations

results = pages.search 'category:scarves knitted', 20, 0

puts results

puts results.allocations

-----

I hope this example helps with understanding.

All the best and good luck :)

   Florian 

[Neil Gladstone]

Florian, Thank you very much for your help.

[Picky / Florian Hanke]

My pleasure!