Field

Meaning

Actinic Maintains Search Page

Actinic Business/Designer only

Leave this box selected if you want Actinic to manage the search tools.

If you de-select this box then you have the opportunity of manually configuring the search tool. There are some methods described in the 'Advanced Users Guide' - see Further Ways To Get Help.

Show Searching on Front Page

Select this box if you want to show the search tool on the front page of the online store.

Use Searching as the Primary Interface to Catalog

If you select this option, customers will only be able to find products through the search facility because the site map icon and section navigation links will have been removed.

Allow Searching By Sections

Selecting this box adds an extra drop-down on the search tool. This allows customers to target their product search to a particular section. Sub sections of the selected section are also searched.

Note: Selecting this option will open an extra option in each section and sub section dialog - 'Include as Selectable Section on Search Page' - see Overview of Sections.

Remove Entire Site as a Section Choice

This box only becomes active after selecting 'Allow Searching by Sections'. It will remove the option for 'Entire Site' from the list of searchable sections generated by the search tool.

Allow Priced Based Searches.

In addition to text-based searching, you can allow your customers to filter their search by price band.

Price Bands

To add a new band, click the '+' in the top left corner of the 'Price Bands' table. To delete a band, right-click and select 'Delete Row'

You can edit the values in the price bands by simply overwriting the price in the 'Maximum' column. The 'Minimum' column values are automatically generated.

The highest band that will be displayed to customers in the drop down list is for prices greater than those in the last table row. So if your final table row was '80.01 - 100.00', an additional price band of '100.01+' will appear in the search drop down.

Field

Meaning

Index Products

Select this box if you would like your product text (short description, product reference and full description) to be searched on.

Index Product Duplicates

Select this box if you would like your product duplicates to be included in the search.

Index Page Fragments

Select this box if you would like your fragments in the store pages to be indexed by the search.

Fragments in brochure pages are not indexed.

Index Extended Product Info

Select this box if you would like the 'Text' field in the 'Extended Info' tab to be included in the online search.

Add Section Information To Product Text When Indexing

If you select this box, then all the text within a section will also be searched on when Actinic is looking for a product within that section.

Valid Characters

The index breaks product descriptions into words. A word is defined as any contiguous collection of characters in the word character set. For example, if the product description is "This high-backed chair has been designed with comfort...", the index engine will identify the following words:

'this, high, backed, chair, has, been, designed, with, comfort'

However, if you would like 'high-backed' indexed as a single word, you need to add '-' to the word character set.

The list should be modified with care. The following characters should not be used: !<>&;:$%*#.

Not Indexed

This is a set of words that will not be indexed (i.e. not associated with a product).

This list contains common words that would be meaningless in the context of a search. Indexing these words would enlarge the index file and slow the search operation. Typically the stop list consists of words like 'a', 'the', and 'and' as well as adjectives like 'handy', 'special' 'unique' and proper nouns - including perhaps your company name, if it forms part of your product name.

Adding words to the stop list decreases the size of the index and improves performance, but be careful not to add words to the stop list that may be important to your customers when searching. In the example given above, by default the index engine will only index the following words:

high, backed, chair, designed, comfort

If you only sell chairs, you would probably want to add the word 'chair' to the stop list since it will not improve searching clarity and will reduce searching performance. So the word set example above will be reduced, before being indexed, to:

high, backed, designed, comfort