Search returns no results when user searches using plural version of keyword

When a user uses the plural version of a keyword, they may not see the appropriate search results:

http://demo.nopcommerce.com/search?q=t-shirt
http://demo.nopcommerce.com/search?q=t-shirts

In the above example, both "t-shirt" and "t-shirts" should return the same results.

Obviously, we can add the plural version to an indexed field in our database, but this could be remedied using the Singularize() method in System.Data.Entity.Design.PluralizationServices (or some other library).

Interesting...
It was because of this and a few other limitations of the built-in search that we elected to integrate google custom search into our site instead. The principle reason being that the search only returned category/product related results...we needed it to include Blog results, topic page results, and article results (created using a plugin)...

Steve

embryo wrote:

Yeah, I think there could be some improvements made to this search. Like you, we want to change the fields that are indexed. Someone posted a solution for altering the search here.

I think a search enhancement/customization plugin is gonna be my first contribution to the nopCommerce community... Most of our users go straight to the search to find what they need, and issues like this cost us some major $$!

Hi,

By default nopCommerce uses exact match when searching. Try to enable full-text search in admin area > configuration > general settings (by MS SQL)

a.m. wrote:

Hi Andrei,

I have tried each of the Full-Text settings. No luck with any of them. The 'Using CONTAINS and OR with prefix_term' option reveals products, but too many that are not relevant.

With our last framework, I developed a custom search and when doing so, I researched how our users were searching. I found that the majority of users would use keywords like "hdmi to dvi". The products that they were looking for had names like "10ft HDMI Male to DVI Male Cable".

a.m. wrote:

I forgot to mention, even with the OR Full-Text setting enabled, pluralized keywords do not yield results:

"t-shirts" = No results
"t-shirt" = Results

I'm sure that this is because "t-shirt" does not contain "t-shirts"... It would be great if search would convert the keyword(s) to the singular version of the word prior to sending it to the SQL query.

Has there been any other development around this? I have enabled full text and still have the issue with plural items.

Drill = 50 Results
Drills = 0 Results

Hello!

I'm also looking for something that can help on our search.
Currently I was able to use full text search with accent insentitive by rebuilding the catalog using:

ALTER FULLTEXT CATALOG nopCommerceFullTextCatalog REBUILD WITH ACCENT_SENSITIVITY=OFF
GO

However, I cannot seem to find a workaround for plurals.
Does anyone have a clue that can help us?

tmoucho wrote:
It may be best to Google/search for that - e.g.
https://www.sqlservercentral.com/forums/topic/plural-form-of-search-string-with-contains-in-full-text-search

Nop team don't ever go back and improve poorly implemented features, they're too busy trying to keep up with Microsoft's endless stream of framework updates.

Search is so fundamental to e-commerce, and yet Nop team believes this weak implementation is sufficient. Weird isn't it, how developers lose focus of the things that matter?