Du Vien Trang is a Freelance Web Designer / Developer based in Scotland. This is his portfolio, blog and his digital playground.

As a site becomes larger and fill with rich contents, it is vital to have a search feature that will make life easy for your end user to find what they want on your site.

Drupal is aware of this and has ensure the built in search can go beyond just merely listing contents on a page(s). It is now more smarter and more usable than before. Here are 12 patchs submitted by Robert Douglass. The list is impressive:

1. refactor search node_rank with hook_node_rank scoring factors
2. Path module should add URL alias to update index in nodapi.
3. Add spelling suggestions to the “no search results found” page.
4. Patch To Add User Profile Search
5. search_index hardcodes boosts to html elements. Should be configurable.
6. Exclude node types from search index
7. Optional Exclusion of Taxonomy Vocabulary from Advanced Search
8. Indexing options for taxonomy
9. Add scoring factor controls to advanced search form
The administrator can adjust runtime scoring factors on the site configuration -> search page. Why not let the end user decide how important each scoring factor should be by using the advanced search form?
10. Fix search index link handling for non-existent nodes
Esoteric bug with an RTBC patch (waiting for just one more review) that fixes the case when someone links to a not-yet-created node.
11. Showing result count and result range in search results: This is really a feature request for the pager. Why don’t we have something like “Showing 10-20 from 500 results” on our search pages?
12. Replace “blue smurf” in no search results message: The quintessential bike shed argument. What two words should replace “blue smurf”?

This list and full details can be found at robshouse.net.

You can begin to test these patches now.