I help maintain a site that relies heavily on Location, and locative information in general. In a set of changes I'm working on, I am trying to add in search, and have found that locations are not part of the site index. For this case, I don't need proximity, or geospatial searching, and am interested in discussing approaches for a simple location search.
An example of my problem looks something like this: If I search "New York" I will only get results where "New York" appears in the body of the node, and not all the nodes where "New York" is at least the city field. I'm not expecting "New York" searches to return all states in NY (state/province abbreviation), or even for things in Brooklyn (as Brooklyn is the postal City, despite being part of NYC). I really just want some level of simple text matching. For instance I am expecting to get results for "Houston Texas" on searches for "Houston Street".
I understand that the majority of locative information searching is done with geospatial considerations, and that simple text matching is actually not desirable for most use cases. However I am interested in discussing methods to include this kind of simple text matching into the search index, for the use cases like mine where a single simple search field is all I want for the site, and proximity is basically irrelevant.
Is this something I could fake with Views?
Is there another better method, or something obvious I'm missing?
Is this even a discussion, or set of features that anyone but me would find useful?
Comments
When I enabled the location
When I enabled the location module (6.x-3.0-rc2) in my Drupal 6 install, there was a location search module that I enabled, too. Are you wanting something more than that, or could that be the thing you've missed? It appears that when I have Portland entered in the location city, it matches it just fine in the search, giving a teaser result from the node, and that when I use the Location tab to search, I get the location fields.
With the state field, I see something different. Even though I enter Oregon in the drop down, it's shortened to OR which is too short for the default requirement of three letters to be indexed. If I change that to 2 letter, it does pick up the state, but of course, gives way too many results for OR.
It appears that if I were to include province_name instead of just province on the node template, I would get Oregon in the results.
Weird.
For some reason that tab had not shown up until I ran update.php again.
There's a new issue I'm having with the Locations search tab. Its returning three results for every node, all in the same list.
and for completeness...
I think that I uncovered a bug in Location Search, which I reported and patched on the issue queue.
Essentially Location Search was returning all version of a node that it had tracked in the location_instance table, instead of just the most recent one.