customize search results without access to admin settings?

Hi, I have sort of an odd question, but I'm hoping someone can help.

I work for a branch of an organization that's using nopCommerce version 4.30 to run an "online portal" where we present free downloadable PDFs to the public. Each PDF document is a "product" in nopCommerce.

As some background, we do not have access to the admin installation and configuration settings for nopCommerce. We can go in and add products and categories via an admin front-end, but we don't have access to the true back-end install/configure settings. Those are controlled by our IT department. In addition, IT has informed us that they have no plans to upgrade us to the latest version of nopCommerce.

Our problem is this. Among the many PDFs we have to offer, a handful of these are very important and popular. But when someone goes to the Search box and enters the title or keyword for one of these important/popular resources, the search results come back with a long alphabetical list of ALL resources that have ANY word from the entered title/keyword. Instead of this, what we'd like to have happen is that the search results would have the more relevant/popular/important PDFs relating to the title/keyword at the top of the search results; failing that, at least we'd like to not have the search be an OR search, but rather an AND search, so that we don't get tons of search results that only partially match the search terms.

Is that something that can be done outside the back-end configuration settings? If not, CAN it be done in the back-end configuration settings, or is it just not possible? Is it something that can be done in 4.30, or is it something that can be done in a later version of nopCommerce?

Changing version will probably not do to much more to help given your custom requirements
To do any of this will require either customization or maybe there is a plugin that can help you
See https://www.nopcommerce.com/en/extensions?category=search-navigation&version=430

Hmmm, thanks. So there's no way (without a plugin etc) to change the search from matching ANY search term with all the products, to switch it to an ALL search? So for instance, if I have 500 PDFs that have the word "big" in their title,  but I want the specific PDF whose title is "big brown hairy dog" to be near the top of the list of search results, there's no way to get that to happen, even if I search for "big brown hairy dog" specifically?

Hey Canadave,

I sent you the details in a private message. Kindly please check and advise for the next.

Regards,