When we went live with our new site (latemodelrestoration.com) at the end of July 2009 there were a lot of improvements baked in, a big one was the search functionality.

On the old site, I'm embarrassed to say, if you did a search for "mustang cold air kit" we returned only products that had the exact phrase somewhere in the item number, product name OR description. As you can imagine this resulted in some pretty unsatisfactory results in almost every scenario, because you were either going to get no results for longer search phrases or 10,000 results for single word searches.

On the new site if you do a search for "mustang cold air kit", we will split the phrase on the spaces and search the product name for "mustang", "cold", "air", and "kit", by doing this we can return much more relevant results which makes it easier to find what you are looking for.

A new feature that was added just yesterday is the ability to filter your search results based on your particular vehicle type. Say for instance you come to our site and you want to find a cold air kit. More than likely you will go to the search box, type in cold air kit and start browsing. Since we went live with the new site you would have to wade through cold air kits that fit Challengers, Camaros, Chevy trucks, Ford trucks and Dodge trucks, well not any more!

Now, if you are on a page that has a Mustang layout and you do a search for cold air kit, you will only see cold air kits that fit Mustangs! The same goes for Challengers, Camaros, Chevy trucks etc. If you decide that you DO want to see parts for all vehicle types, all you have to do is remove the vehicle filter and voila!

Another feature that was added just yesterday is the ability to search not only products, but categories, brands, and pages. If you do the same search for cold air kit, on the right hand side you will see categories that contain your search terms.

And because I am filtering by the Mustang vehicle type, only results that match that vehicle type are returned. If you remove the vehicle filter this is what you will see.

Also, if your search term matches any of the brands in our database you will see them on the right hand side as well. Say for instance you do a search for "ford racing", as you would expect Ford Racing shows up right there.

I mentioned above that "pages" are also returned when you do a search. A page is just a place for us to put static content such as technical data, application charts, or whatever else we want to put online. While not as useful as some of the other features there are some cases where it may come in handy. Let's say you do a search for "mustang wallpaper", well we don't have any products that match "mustang wallpaper" but we do have a page of downloadable mustang wallpapers and it does match so there you go.

Oh, the page results are also filtered by vehicle type.

I've probably bored you for long enough. There are a couple of other enhancements in the search such as a more in depth search if no results are returned and some very primitive de-pluralization. But I guess you'll just have to try for yourself. Happy searching.