Multiple category searches via one query link?

I believe all you have to do is include both words and search like you would on Google or Yahoo or wherever.

search: apple banana

or I think you might be able to use quotes and pluses like this:

search: +apple +banana

search: “apple banana”

Give it a try.

The searches go across categories already.

I agree that the advanced search techniques are possible for the users who know how to use them, but I need a search box and then checkboxes for the different categories. To use marc0047’s example in my site, I’d want to make two sets of boxes, one for location (Los Angeles, San Francisco, etc.) and the other for job description (Painter, Plumber, etc.). I’d want to be able to check boxes:

JOB SEARCH

Location:
[x] Los Angeles
[] San Francisco

Job:
[]Painter
[x]Plumber

So that with Los Angeles and Plumber checked, the search results would show me all jobs in L.A. for Plumbers (and not ALL jobs in L.A. or ALL Plumber jobs).

Is this beyond WordPress? If so, any suggestions on something I could use to make this work? The site in question is currently in an old MT install that I’d love to move to WP, but I do need this advanced search to work.

If someone can guide me to simple hack/plugin, I’d be much obliged. If it looks like it’s a more-than-simple hack/plugin, I’m ready to talk dollars.

Thanks for any leads, links, letters, or laughs.

– Bradley

Wondering if Bradley/likoma’s request is possible, or if someone knows enough PHP to hack together an “AND” search like what he is talking about.

I looked inside classes.php (WP 1.5.1.2/wp-includes) and found on line 388:
$andor = ‘OR’;
I tried changing this to ‘AND’ to see if that would get me an “AND” search rather than an “OR” search but now it doesn’t find anything. I think I see why this doesn’t work, but am at a loss for how to get it to search for posts that belong to category x AND category Y.

Any help would be greatly appreciated (of course). Thanks in advance.

– Sujai

The aforementioned tags plugin is by Felix Wong (http://boke.name/c/wordpress-tags). Thanks Felix.

The plugin works as described. So this will do for now. But it would still be great to have this functionality for Categories as well. Any takers?

Some things to keep in mind:

1. It involves changing three files in /wp-admin (for an input field to enter tags)

2. The tags can only be space separated. I made the mistake of typing “mumbai, health” and got errors when I tried to access the URL “http://blog.site/tags/mumbai” because the “,” got stored as part of the tag

3. You have to uninstall the “Post tags” plugin first because there is a conflict (both use ‘tags’ as part of the URL to access tagged info)

I’ve also come across this issue and would like to be able to pull up search results that only appear in multiple categories. I’m not particularly keen on using a tag plugin because it’s the categories I’m after. Anyone got anymore suggestions?

Add me as well to this list.

Fooddude,

Not only does it work, but it’s fun! Thanks for posting here.

I’m going to need this to work (in some format) very soon as I’m redoing the job search site in WP (was MT). Just found a competitor of theirs that has a very nice search function doing just what I need (not as fun as Fooddude, though!):

MHA Global (search)

I’ll go checkout UTW 3.0, thanks.