I am often contacted by customers who are unable to find items using the website search function due to entering plural search terms such as 'doors' or 'carpets' which produce no results rather than 'door' or 'carpet' which would produce lots of relevant results. I am aware that it is possible to enter additional search terms for individual products, but it would be useful if the search function could show matches where the extra 's' is entered.
This seems like quite an important issue and I've got it working now in the PHP version for the regular search results. I'll start on the ASP version now but in the meantime, does anyone think this would be necessary in the Progressing Search? The reason I ask is that if you are typing and getting results, then type a final "s" and the results disappear, it should be quite obvious that the solution is to remove the last character, no?
That's good news.. I think the people having this problem probably just enter their search query without looking at the progressing search results. So providing the 'S' is ignored when generating the actual search results I don't think it would be necessary to update the progressing search results which appear as they are typing.
Thinking about this, there are other plural suffixes such as 'es', but I imagine it would be very difficult to allow for all of them. I think the 's' is probably the most common one so hopefully this will work in most instances.