exact search not working properly

I’d check the data. Searching for “creek” or “grove” alone matches both Jamie Armanino and Romy Mason. So, it’s not at all about AND or OR search settings or the word “Walnut” appearing in both cases. Looks like both reps match both “creek” and “grove” for some reason. Can’t tell why, because based on the visible pages, neither should match, so obviously you’re running the search based on some custom fields or other meta data.

Well, both Jamie and Romy and the other reps have towns/cities that they represent that have “Creek” or “grove” in their names.

The search is searching the tags for each sales rep (not visible content) — the tags are the list of the towns/cities that each rep covers. I’ve checked those lists and there are no repeats of exact matches and I’ve got the following settings set:

AND – require all terms
disable OR fallback
Don’t use Fuzzy search

the tag weight is set at 100 – and all the other elements (Post titles, Comment text, and Category Weight) are set to 0.

So, it is searching the content that I want it to, but it isn’t quite returning the results I want it to …

Any other thoughts/things I can try?

This is the search behaviour you’re looking for.

If you want search to only return exact matches, you need to wrap the search query in quotes. AND only requires all terms to be present in the resulting post, but doesn’t look for the exact phrase. You need quotes for that.

If you want that to be the default behaviour, it is possible to write code that forces all search queries to be phrase queries. However, that may have some unwanted side effects.

What would probably be better would be to show users somehow why the results were returned. Then when someone searches for “Walnut Grove”, they’d see that Romy is based on Walnut Grove and is who they want, and they’d see that Jamie is in Walnut Creek and that’s why the search picked her up.

Ok, I get it — so the “AND” search is looking for both terms somewhere in the tags — but not the exact phrase …

do you have any tips on how I can force all searches to be exact search/have quotes around them — behind the scenes? I know this isn’t relevant to the plugin, but if you have some thoughts or ideas, I would appreciate it…

thank you.

In theory it’s this simple:

add_filter('relevanssi_modify_wp_query', 'rlv_add_quotes');
function rlv_add_quotes($query) {
    $query->query_vars['s'] = '"' . $query->query_vars['s'] . '"';
    return $query;
}

Add this code to your theme functions.php, and all searches will be wrapped in quotes. Of course, you should make it probably a bit smarter and check if the search is already wrapped in quotes, but that’s the basic idea.

thank you!!!!