Drupal Search Functionality

Things that can improve your searching capabilities in Drupal are:

1) Taxonomy terms (by default) and their Synonyms (through this module http://drupal.org/project/synonyms). You have to associate nodes to taxonomy in advance, of course. Later changes to taxonomy synonyms does not affect results without an index rebuilt.

2) Stemmers modules, English, French, etc. This will index simplest words, no plurals, root from verbs , for example, lovers, love, etc as lov. English stemmer is appointed for 4.7 but runs in 5.1 without any problem. Stemming other languages could be avaliable soon, I'm testing my Spanish stemmer for a while before uploading it. Once it runs ok, I will have Italian and Portuguese stemmers very close (they are similar romance languages). Also, I'm trying and "Spa-nglish" stemmer, due to the spread of english words in spanish community.

Also there, you may filter stop words, i.e. common prepositions (or transform to synonyms), like ' a ', ' the ' etc that you will not desire in your queries.

3) Accents module, will remove accents before indexing and searching.

There are also other modules like Swish-e, some works to integrate Lucene / Nutch but I've never tried.

I think could be very useful to add a new category in http://drupal.org/project/Modules grouping "search" related modules and tools.

Hope this helps. If someone have more things to add in the list, please, go ahead.
Gustavo

http://www.lullabot.com/articles/drupals_search_module_and_scoring_factors
And the documentation in the code itself as seen on api.drupal.org
http://api.drupal.org/api/5
http://api.drupal.org/api/5/group/search

Also check out the porter-stemmer module that extends the built in search capabilities and is in use here on drupal.org. Drupal core search was meant to be extended.

-Steven Peck
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Test site, always start with a test site.
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