Search catalog - Phil's Hobby Shop

Here are some tips to help you search Phil's Hobby Shop:

What is indexed

You can search for items based on the SKU, title, description, and categories (including manufacturer) of each product. Other information appearing on each product page is not indexed.

Boolean queries

Ordinarily, a query looks for documents that match all words. For example, losi 8ight parts will find all documents containing the three words "losi", "8ight", and "parts". This is often called "AND" behavior. You can change the behavior with two special operators: OR and (...) (parentheses).

OR

You can use the operator OR (all capital letters) to look for documents matching only some of the words. To find documents containing the words "losi" and "car" or the words "traxxas" and "truck", search for losi car OR traxxas truck.

Parentheses

You can apply OR rules to only some of the words using parentheses. The query traxxas (car OR truck) will find all documents that contain "traxxas" and at least one of "car" or "truck". Likewise, (happy OR fun) (stick OR ball) will find "happy stick", "happy ball", "fun stick", "fun ball", and, yes, "happy fun ball".

Words

The following common words are not indexed:

One-letter words other than g, n, o
These words: features, includes, requires, this, the, for, and, specs, with, from, box, jxs, irjxs
These words when in all lowercase: or, to, is, of, are, at, in

Words containing a hyphen, apostrophe, period, or other punctuation are indexed under their individual words and under the words put together. For example, "half-life" is indexed under both "halflife" and "half life", and "9/11" is indexed as 911 and 11, ignoring the single-character "9". Hyphenated queries are broken up the same way: when you search for half-life, it will search for documents that contain halflife OR half life, and t-maxx is treated as tmaxx OR maxx after removing the common word "t".

Limiting terms

At the left side of each search result page is a set of links to narrow the results based on specifics of the product listing. These links add keywords called "limiting terms" to the query. Examples include priceabove:100 to show items whose price is more than $100, pricebelow:100 to show items whose price is less than $100, and new:14 to show products added to the catalog in the past 14 days. Limiting terms do not participate in OR logic.

Ranking

Phil's Hobby Shop product search places the most relevant results first. It determines relevance from the following:

The number of times the page has been viewed. For example, a ready-to-use product is more relevant than replacement parts for the same product.
How common the word is within a particular page. A page that mentions a word often is more relevant than a page that mentions a word only in passing.
How rare the word is across all pages. Rare words like "tmaxx" are more relevant than, for example, "parts".
In queries using the OR operator, how many of the terms it contains.
Whether the item is in stock.