ExpressionEngine -> Search Module Issues

We’ve been having a lot of problems with our search module functionality.

This is the tag:

{exp:search:simple_form channel="courses|static_courses|courses_general|online_courses" no_result_page="search/noresults" status="open" search_in="everywhere" where="exact"}
<input type="text" name="keywords" id="keywords" value="Search NA" class="mr10" 'Search NA')"/>
<input type="hidden" name="orderby" value="title"/>
<input type="hidden" name="sort_order" value="asc"/>
<input type="submit" class="darkBtn" value="SEARCH"/>
{/exp:search:simple_form}

If I set where=“any”, it brings up a whole lot of results but most of them don’t have a single one of the search terms on the page.
If I set where=“all”, it NEVER shows any results.
If I set where=“exact” it sometimes brings up the full search term but not always.

Any ideas as to what I need to look for?

Solution

where="all" is the parameter I use most often. It's what most people would be used to in terms of search syntax.

If you're not getting any results, here are a couple of things to check:

make sure all of your channel fields are set to be searchable on their field settings screens
make sure the entries you're expecting results from are not set to custom statuses, or future-dated (in those cases you'd need to add status="not closed" and show_future_entries="yes" and/or show_expired="yes")
if you're using third-party fieldtypes, look into what they actually store in the exp_channel_data table fields (they may output your data on the front-end, but that data may be stored in a third-party database table, or otherwise encoded, making it invisible to the Search module)