Mellis and Associates, Inc.

My friend Nicole wrote that she couldn't find the phone number on the new church web site that I have been using as a Drupal learning project. The number wasn't listed on the home page and when she searched for "phone" she got no results. Hmm, sez I, must be some mistake. I do the search, same result, which is to say no result for "phone". Off I go to do a little research. Here are some of the things I've learned.

Drupal's core search module does not match on misspelling or partial word or wildcard matches.

If the person performing the search somehow enters the root of the search term correctly, there is a module implementing the Porter Stemming Algorithm that can help find relevant results.

Drupal's core search engine only searches text that is stored in the database — so, for example, attached documents are not searched. There is a module that can help called Search Files. It uses helper applications to "look inside" the attachments; there may be security or privacy issues because of that. Certainly the security of the implementation should be investigated prior to trusting it with particularly sensitive information.

You can tune Drupal's core search module from the admin/settings/search page.

So how did I fix my predicament? First, I added a block with the address and phone number to the home page, and I labelled the phone number there "Phone" instead of "Telephone". Next, I am going to install the Porter-Stemmer module.