Advanced Search Query Guide

Our previous post was devoted to searching tenders, intelligent search, and filters. This time, we would like to focus on keyword filter that allows you to control the range of tenders you want to search among.

Let's say you supply automotive equipment, be that cars or machinery. However, you neither supply auto parts, nor provide any associated services or works.

Creating a Search Query

Use the search box to specify the types of equipment that you want to find. Seldon.Pro will show all the tenders that contain all or any of the words in your search query.

First, let's type in automobile and hit Enter. This one-word query will yield all tenders pertaining to all types of automobiles:

Next, type in machinery and hit Enter. The second word will be added to the first one and expand the search:

You can go ahead and add more words to the query. Just separate the search words using a comma to speed up the process.

The query will look like this:

car, vacuum machine, all-terrain vehicle, off-road*, truck, cargo transport, rear-wheel*, passenger car, minibus, garbage truck, front-wheel*, all-wheel drive, special vehicle, special machinery, special equipment, heavy machinery, chassis:

You may remember what asterisk (*) does from one of our previous posts: it signifies an unknown sequence of characters it can be replaced with, therefore off-road* will include off-road vehicles, off-road trucks, off-road wheels, etc. See this post for more information.

Customers tend to use different terms to signify similar notions and things, therefore being able to use multiple keywords within one search query is crucial.

Search Refinement

This search query returns a wide range of tenders, many of which are redundant as the query contains a lot of items. The next step is narrowing the query down.

You can do that from the Advanced search tab using the keyword filter (it's the one with a search box and three parameters: "May contain", "Must contain" and "Does not contain"):

We have already used the "may contain" parameter when we listed the keywords. By default, Seldon.Pro's search engine processes each query separately and then combines the search results.

You can see the complete list of keywords and edit it at any time. To add another keyword enter it in the search box, select "may contain" (default parameter) and hit Enter. You can also select it from the list of suggestions:

To remove a keyword, left-click on the X button. To temporarily disable a keyword, left-click on it (the box will turn grey):

Let's see how the 'does not contain' parameter works. Select the parameter and list the keywords you don't want to see in the search results separated by a comma and hit Enter:

autoparts, car wash, combust*, spare part, materials, equipment, services, works, repairs. We have created a list of stop-words and this is what the filter looks like now:

You can save the filter to use it later so you don't have to create it from scratch again. Click the "Save and start watching" button to do so. The filters are saved in the Widgets section.

Click here to see the filter we have just created.

Filter Refinement

You can adjust and modify filters at any point in time. This way you can eliminate redundant tenders after analyzing the search results. Just add new stop-words to your filter: oil, battery, tire service, fuel, gasoline, etc.

Make sure you save the modified filter under the same name. Select "Replace" instead of "Create" to avoid creating a new filter:

'Must Contain'

We didn't mention this parameter as we didn't actually use it in our example, however it is useful as well.

Enabling this parameter for a search query of passanger vehicle, supply will limit the search results to just the tenders that contain all of the specified items:

If you are using the 'may contain' parameter for a search query of automobile, minibus, specialized machinery, and add supply with the 'must contain' parameter enabled, Seldon.Pro will modify the query to make it look like this: supply automobile, supply minibus, supply specizlized machinery:

Lack of prepositions in the modified query does not affect the search as Seldon.Pro uses special linguistic algorithms to process search queries and retrieve word agreement.