Magento Improved Search

In recent years Magento has become preferred tool for eCommerce sites, this is due to rich features and flexibility offered by Magento. It has built-in product search which is based on mysql full-text search and “like”. This serves the basic searching needs for visitors but lacks the ability to provide high quality relevant results in quick manner. The search process creates extra load on server which degrades overall performance of the site.

We offer services to take Magento’s product search to next level by using power of Sphinx. We integrate Sphinx into Magento to produce fast and relevant results. Sphinx eliminates basic issue which are due to limitation of mysql full-text search and can add many excellent features.

Here are few advantages offered by sphinx over default full-text search.

Sphinx Search has state of the art relevancy ranking algorithms as compared to years old algorithms of mysql. It analyzes keyword proximity as well. This way it ranks closer phrase matches higher than others and ranks exact matches on top. It also consider keyword frequency in a record and all other records to cater keyword stuffing. It offers a number of built-in relevance ranking algorithms to address specific needs.

Mysql full-text indexes are large which means as the site grows the performance of search is degraded. It also consumes more resources which impact overall performance of site. Sphinx is fast by default and consumes very few resources.

This means sphinx can handle singular and plural forms for the words itself. For example searching for “baby” and “babies” will return same results.

It allows to normalize the spelling variations, synonyms and abbreviation. Consider a situation where “hovers” and  “vacuum cleaner” are essentially same product, similar “ac” and “air conditioner” as also same.

Mysql has big list of keywords which are not indexes and are not searchable. This has many common words like “used”. Sphinx allows to search via such keywords as well.

In summary Sphinx Search can help you increase conversion from you search pages by providing relevant and super fast results. For further details you can contact us.