What are the limits of Fuzzy Search?

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Brandon Hassler
Brandon Hassler Member ✭
in ❓Other questions
I've got a shopping/price comparison website I'm building so search is a big part of the magic. Rolling out Fuzzy Search for Xano was HUGE for this!

I'm wondering if there is a way to influence the "rank" of my search results beyond just matching text.

For example, if a user searches "gaming monitors" Xano is currently looking at the following fields to determine the "rank":
• Product Name
• Product Description


My search results would be much more powerful if I were to also be to include other fields as well such as:
• Number of customer reviews
• Average customer rating
• Current Discount amount


Has anybody attempted build more sophisticated search engines using Xano to accomplish something like this?
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  • Michael Udinski
    Michael Udinski Administrator

    ADMIN
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    Hey  you can still apply additional filtering to work with the fuzzy search so you should definitely be able to include all that
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  • Brandon Hassler
    Brandon Hassler Member ✭
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     When you say "additional filtering" are you referring to the new indexing feature to determine the "weight" of different items when ranking or just more broad Xano filtering? If I understand correctly, filtering a query is a more of a black and white thing: "Get items that meet this criteria." And when it comes to sorting I can only sort one metric at a time.

    I'm confused on how I'd be able to train Xano to factor in non-text values. So for example, when a search for "monitor" happens and there are two products in my database that match that, I want the one that has 500 reviews with a 4.7 rating to have a better "rank" score than the one with 30 reviews and a 4.2 rating.
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  • Michael Udinski
    Michael Udinski Administrator

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     to me, this sounds like you are actually concerned with sorting rather than searching. Xano supports sorting on multiple fields. The fuzzy search "ranking" is for when you are searching on multiple fields - if there is a field of higher importance... But you can add as many fields as you'd like to your sort on the output tab of query all records. 
    [CleanShot 2022-07-28 at 08.47.23.png][CleanShot 2022-07-28 at 08.46.38.png]
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  • Brandon Hassler
    Brandon Hassler Member ✭
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     Whoa! I noticed Xano didn't stop me from adding multiple sorts but I couldn't find any documentation on how Xano processes multiple fields for a sort so I assumed adding more than one would just ignore the rest.

    So it sorting the results in the order of how it's listed? I'll have to play around with this and test out some search results.

    Can I accomplish multiple sort fields via the External tab or is that limited to just one sort field at a time?
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