FIX Magento Search Please!

[gfxguru]

The more I think about the unwillingness to repair a major flaw in Magento the more I think about migrating to another platform. I've worked with so many ecommerce platforms that have zero problems with one of the most important storefront features "SEARCH". I've also watch so many customers search a site and leave the site because a search never presented the actually product the customer was looking for but the store possessed.... That is called a flaw!
Now I understand it's quite an undertaking, but putting it off or relying of someone else to provide such capabilities is not the solution either. I say we fix the issue and make it a top priority. NOW before 2.0 is released.
This is a major issue with magento and if you haven't noticed it yet then you haven't run a store... Period

100% on target - should be top priority.

[JosephMaxwell]

I agree that the search is very poor at best. We have been using Google SiteSearch, which has been an acceptable alternative, although we do not have the control that we would like. I think most of that can be overcome with more code. It would be very nice to have a free solution to this basic problem.

+1 for this being top priority. Please give the best shopping cart out there the best search.

[ryansunxl]

I think solr and the php solr extension should be introduced to magento
core and disabled by default, so people who don't need it do not have to
worry about setting up additional search server.

On Thu, Jul 24, 2014 at 9:55 AM, Joseph Maxwell notifications@github.com
wrote:

I agree that the search is very poor at best. We have been using Google
SiteSearch, which has been an acceptable alternative, although we do not
have the control that we would like. I think most of that can be overcome
with more code. It would be very nice to have a free solution to this basic
problem.

+1 for this being top priority. Please give the best shopping cart out
there the best search.

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
#622 (comment).

[choukalos]

For Magento 2.0 we're planning on modularizing search and making it easier to customize. For search improvement it's already a high priority ( with a lot of items I'm pushing for ) but there's still debate on when and how those improvements will release. Please keep commenting and specifically state what you want as highest search priority. That'll help us refine prioritization and how we could release in light of other priorities.

So far I see ( 1 for better search results; 1 for more search control ); please get others to comment/weigh in and provide specifics on their top search item to address.

@ryansun currently we're planning on mysql search for CE and SOLR for EE; with hooks for the community to easily support other search engines like sphinx, etc.

@gfxguru when you say more accurate search results do you have something in mind specifically ( based on my research/understanding it's 2 things - weighting control & search reports to identify search terms with no results; i.e. identify the case you're describing with weighting control to address/fix ).

Thanks!
Chuck ( I own the Search domain for Magento / Product Management; Any suggestions/ideas to improve please feel free to ping me directly )

[gfxguru]

Why does search work so well on the backend but terrible on the frontend? I don't get it?

[gfxguru]

Does enterprise suffer from such capabilities? no.. neither does prestashop, shopkart, woocommerce, bvcommerce, bigcommerce, shopify or volusion... ok, some better than other true but magento's inability to fetch even something similar to the users search, one must get strategic in creating products.
I could talk all day about functionality and capabilities, I think if we just get the better results would be the key. Lets get that right and then an addon's that posses the reporting and weighted results could be an awesome extension I would think.

[gfxguru]

Ok i was a bit harsh, I apologize..To explain, I've been with Magento since it's infancy and this has been my arch nemesis in more way's then I care to explain.

[CodeMonkey90]

@choukalos IMO the top priority (apart from making the default search return reasonable results, which is kind of obvious) should be making both the search process (e.g. weighting of product attributes, filtering out certain products) and the search result page (visual representation, e.g. grouping results by product type/category/etc) as easy to customize as possible. There is no one-size-fits-all solution, so ideally developers should be able to customize Magento's search module without having to rewrite it completely.

[kbariotis]

+1 for making this a top priority and for a more customisable and extensible search module.

[choukalos]

@Landkeks - in our upcoming December ( platform beta ) release we'll introduce search modularity to Magento 2 that should address the communities desire to customize all aspects of search (which I've gotten lots of feedback on this need).

Unfortunately I haven't gotten as much feedback on technical suggestions to fix the search algorithm ( mysql/default out of the box). Lots of suggestions on configurations/merchandizing features. Are there any agreed upon technical suggestions on how to improve search accuracy? I have a few but not necessarily correlate. We'd appreciate any suggestions you or the community have to improve the algorithm.

Thanks!

[barbazul]

@choukalos From a technical view,

• Change "OR" for "AND" when concateating "Like" conditions because more search tearms should mean more accurate (meaning: less) results
• Configurable query modes, as suggested on the original thread: Better Search Please!! NOW #198 (comment)

[barbazul]

Also less technical, more functional requests:

• Automatic Suggested Terms: Search terms should not be automatically added as suggested search terms. There should be some kind of logic to define when should a S.T be suggested (EG: more than 100 searches, more than 50 results) or should be handled by an admin. The default of sending every term used to the list, leads to bad searches being reused over and over
• More terms should bring less results (explained): If some one searches for a single word term, it should bring more results than someone searching for two, and it is not working like that right now. If currently search for "A" and you get 5 results, then you search for "B" and you get 4 results, when you search for "A B" you will get 9 results, while it should only show the results in both searches separated.
• Configurable Stopwords: Stopwords should be configurable. This would be very handy for other languages (other than English), and for specific industries.
• Automatic Search synonyms: When no results are shown, it would be very usefull to obtain suggestions that are "similar" but do have some results.
• Search Terms Configuration Scope: When you configure a Search Term, you are currently forced to do it within a Website Scope. For sites with many websites and big catalogs (shared in different websites) it would be useful to configure search terms (synonyms and redirects) globally.

[kilianyp]

Just another suggestion - the way how synonyms work:
Right now, when I add a synonym for a search term, magento finds only results, when the customer searches exactly for the term I set an synonymy up. It would be much more useful if every occurrence of that word would be replaced even in search terms with additional words.

This would obviously need more work from the shop administrator but would definitely lead to better results, as you could use it to smooth out common spelling mistakes as well.