mars guitars

OK, so my search form looks like this:


But what I want to do is put links on my site that automatically fill in the search text....

e.g. instead of the user typing 'tuners' in the search box an pressing enter, I want a link that says 'search for all Tuners' and when they click it it does the search. Is there an easy way to pass text to teh search function?

Thanks,
MG

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UnKnown

i use Ajax to suggest words that are pulled out of my database

Attached Images

search.JPG (52.2 KB, 4 views)

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mars guitars

Thanks... looks like a clever trick, but how do I do the basic 'link to specific search' that I'm after. Can I just do it in html? I'm a real numptie at such things, so please state the obvious if I'm missing it...

Thanks

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jumpenjuhosaphat

I've seen similar to what you are talking about...I've seen loads of these searches on the search engines...I think what you need to look up is "Tags", because I think that it is tags that create the searches for you...If your search query looked like /?search=tag, I don't think it would be very difficult to fill in the blanks with common searches....The only thing, where do you find out what the common searches are?

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mars guitars

Hi Jump.

That's exactly the sort of thing I have in mind, but can't make it work and don't know what to change to make it work...

Deciding the search terms is easy - I see it just a way of cross-categorisation.

e.g. Some 'Shubb' brand products are in my Capos section, some are in my Accessories section. If I had a standard search for 'Shubb' I could show customers all Shubb products in one go.

Thanks anyway - I'm sure there's an answer out there somewhere....

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jumpenjuhosaphat

Well, lets think about this a while....What can we do to make this work? Obviously, you are running your own scripts, so you need to integrate this into your site....So, logically, you want Google to perform searches on your site's search function, that's not impossible...The first thing you think "Hey, lets give some links to some of the most common searches".....Okay, so then thought gives birth to what's known as a tag cloud...Right? Now, what we need to know is how to perform this "Tag Cloud" thing on a regular unscripted website? Is that what we are after? I would have to suggest, and I think this would be the most intelligent thing anyone could do...Perform the search, and relay the tag cloud...with mod_rewrite in your pocket.....Recently I've discovered the use of mod_rewrite, and I have doubled my traffic from Google, and trippled it from Yahoo....If you can perform the search to look like: site.com/search/the-tag-im-after.html...then I think that you can do far better on the search engines....

Okay, back on track...How is it that you can utilize this tool? Do you know how to program in PHP? I think it would be relatively easy in PHP, although, you would need to make use of a MySQL database to keep track of your most entered queries...But if you can do that, I really don't think that anything else would be that complicated.

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mars guitars

Jump, many thanks for the stream-of-conciousness response!

That led me to thinking "I must check out mod_rewrite - sounds very useful"...

So I Googled mod_rewrite and found http://www.sitepoint.com/article/guide-url-rewriting , which seemed like a good starting point. Scanned through some stuff about mod_rewrite, then thought "I wonder how the search on this site works"? Did a search and noticed the URL is now: http://www.sitepoint.com/search/sear...&q=mod_rewrite

Had a poke around his source HTML, compared with mine, experimented a bit and hey presto: http://www.marsguitars.co.uk/index.a...H&search=shubb

This is all I was trying to do!! I didn't need to change any code, just understand it a bit better.

I can now put links on my site that carry out pre-defined searches (e.g. click manufacturer's logo to see all products from that manufacturer).

It's a start. Now I just need to think about learning php, tag clouds, mod_rewrite....

Thanks for your help

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Guitar strings and accessories, Rotosound bass strings, Guitar Capos and Guitar Gifts from Mars Guitars UK
. . . .under development.. guitar string guide

UnKnown

are you interested into a search cloud script to be adapted into your site?

Like here at the bottom of the page

http://torrentstorage.com

I was easy to adapt it.

it pulls searches from the database

http://stevethomas.com.au/php/how-to...l-and-css.html

that one is simple to integrate

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