The purpose of powrsrch.mv is to allow a customer to search one or more fields which are made selectable by the store owner. The store owner can choose any fields within the products.dbf structure to be available. If you have an altered products.dbf structure, it will even allow selection of those additional fields (see screen shot below).

You can also exclude a word or phrase. An example of an exclude word usage might be: You sell health food but want the ability for customers to NOT list ingredients they are allergic to. So in the product name field you might have Soup. Then if you have a field in your database called Ingredient the customer could check the name and ingredient fields for searching. In the keyword input they would put soup. In the exclude input they could put MSG. It would search both fields. If it found soup in either it would compile those products to the list. But if the word MSG appeared in either field, it would remove it from the list.

Specific category, if selected, allows one category only searches. This feature may be too intimidating if you have hundreds of categories as the pull down select would be quite long.

New in the compiled version is the ability to specify a price range for the search. Also, in the compiled version we added the ability to display links to numbered pages when the search results exceed the number of matches displayed on a single page. You can use OpenUI Tokens to place the search form in several locations in your store. You also have the ability to replace the default form with one which you design with your own html (for those who know how to write html forms). The alternate html form can also be placed at one of seven different locations on the storefront screen. You'll use the default form as a template and can then add your own layout to improve the look and feel. Also if you are using the compiled Power Search AND the compiled Tell A Friend module, customers can send the search string from Power Search to friends. The store owner also has the ability to allow customers to search the category headers and footers for the search word. Because this may slow the search, you should only use it if your store has a moderate number of categories, e.g. 100 or less. Faster servers may get decent search times with many more than that though. Added new search algorythms "Any of these", Exact phrase", and "Start at beginning". Store owners can create a list of words which will not be searched in the "All of these" or "Any of these" searches. These are words like a, an, the, and, or. It will not exclude those words in the "Start at the beginning" or "Exact phrase" searches. If you choose to use the "search single category" listing, you can modify that from the admin control panel and only list certain categories in the select list, but provide searches of all of their sub-categories. This top down search adds greater flexibility over how broad you will allow your customers to filter the categories. After going to the product page from a Power Search rendered search, a convenient "return to search" link on the product page will bring the customer back to the original search page if using OpenUI.

Power Search (version 4.63) has been tested with OpenDB (version 2.2) and is compatible. In tests by James at Copernicus, the Power Search improved the performance of the already, very fast, SQL searches.
118k products in the database, 2456 categories, two search terms "PC133 RAM"
- Normal Miva Merchant Search: ~60 seconds
- OpenDBv2 Standard Search: TT time=07s0620u
- OpenDBv2 Power Search (limit to code, name & desc fields and no category specific search): TT time=05s0259u

For store owners who have found their searches take too long, you can reduce the search time by only searching one or two fields. The Merchant default is eight fields, including fields such as weight. Now, how useful is that? Finally.... the store owner has control without editing the db.mv code library.

The total number of products found is displayed along with the list of products matching the search criteria.

In admin, you can view the log of search words/phrases which your customers have used. This helps you from a marketing standpoint to determine the most sought after products. Additionally, it helps you identify keywords which might be useful to include in the narrative descriptions or the meta tag for search engine submissions.

This module works with both the MMUI and OpenUI User Interfaces (versions 2.22-4.x). If using the MMUI, six edits in the mmui.mv file are required, and one optional edit if you want to remove the archaic standard Merchant, keyword search. If you have compiled Merchant (4.14 or newer) that requires editing and re-compiling, so for compiled Merchant, OpenUI is required unless you have the compiler license. If you are using the OpenUI, Power Search plugs into the OpenUI without editing OpenUI modules and there is no need for compiling in Merchant 4.14 and newer.