- Description
-
SEARCH FUNCTIONALITY
Our Search Extension comes as an answer to the need of accuracy, speed and quality when it comes to online shopping. It offers Full Text Search for 29 languages, as well as all the product catalog and search features from Magento backed by Solr or Elasticsearch.
Full Text Search returns better results than the default search, with its configurable attributes’ weight for relevance-based sorting and its special handling of product names to ensure accurate matching.
Besides this and other basic search features, like catalog navigation and spell checking, we’ve also added custom functionalities to the extension to help you improve your performance and tailor search results according to your specific business needs.
FLEXIBLE TECHNOLOGY
Evozon’s Search extension offers seamless interoperability with default search engines, the MySQL based search engine for the Magento Community Editions and the Solr 3.6 based engine added by the Magento Enterprise Edition. Additionally, you have many options for connectivity with the search servers, as well as support for all default themes.
You can also switch from one search engine to another whenever you want, as long as you do a full re-indexing of the catalog search full text index afterwards. The extension is shipped with a script to ease the setup of the search server of choice.
CUSTOM FEATURES AND BENEFITS
Autocomplete suggestions for quick search field
Replace the default input in Magento and allow the number of results to be displayed for each of the autocomplete suggestions, with sorting of suggested phrases done by the number of results they would return. The feature is highly customizable and you can select from various suggestion algorithms, so that it better suits your business needs.
Autocomplete shows list of search scopes
Add a section in the autocomplete suggestion drop-down, with suggestions of search strings in the context of a category. You can choose between “pick a random suggestion” and “pick the one that would return the most results”.
Quick search in selected category
You may want to add a drop-down placed either before or after the quick search input, which would narrow the scope of the search to a selected category. The list of categories in the drop-down is also customizable from the Magento administration panel.
Multiple selection through checkboxes in layer navigation
Allows you to select multiple values for one filter in layered navigation, this feature is provided for the attributes of type multi-select and dropdown. The user will see results that have either one of the selected values for that specific attribute. The list of such attributes is customizable from the Magento administration panel.
Benchmark Results
Fulltext search
(sec/page)
Advanced search
(sec/page)
Catalog
(sec/page)
Magento MySQL
N/A 99,187 17,627 Magento Solr
58.615 3,81 15,359 Evozon Solr
3,414 2,294 2,137 Evozon Elastic Search
3,857 2,343 2,573 
notes
Fulltext search on MySQL could not be tested because requests took longer than the 300 sec nginx timeout.
Price navigation filter not working on EE Solr module, so tests were performed without price filter for EE Solr.
The number of results or the expected result for the same query string was not checked to be equal between the different search engines.
Layer navigation filters for select attributes and prices consisted of random values at every request so there were slight differences in filters between different search engine tests.
benchmark machine
CPU
Intel(R) Xeon(R) L5640 @ 2.27GHz
RAM
8 GB
PHP
version 5.5.28, with a memory limit of 512MB
PHP-FRM configuration
pm = dynamic
pm.max_children = 7
pm.start_servers = 4
pm.min_spare_servers = 1
pm.max_spare_servers = 7
nginx
version 1.8.0
MySQL
version 5.6.26 MySQL Community Server
configuration: innodb_buffer_pool_size = 1024M
join_buffer_size = 256M
sort_buffer_size = 16M
read_rnd_buffer_size = 64M
Solr
version 5.0.0, single shard, with a total of 1024MB maximum allocated RAM and 512MB RAM for new generation heap
Elasticsearch
version 1.6.0, single node, with a total of 1024MB maximum allocated RAM and 512MB RAM for new generation heap
benchmark parameters
Number of products
1 milion
Extra product attributes used in search
one price attribute
one boolean attribute
one date attribute
one dropdown attribute
two multiselect attributes
Tool used
Apache JMeter
Number of request threads
5
Number of requests performed by each thread
20
Tested scenarios
- fulltext search with random generated 3-word strings applying layer navigation filters
- advanced search
- catalog category page load applying layer navigation filters
- Change Log
-
1.0.2Sep. 12, 2016
- fixed bug regarding multiple selection in layer navigation: the checkboxes were displayed for all attributes in layer navigation for search results page no matter what attributes were selected in module admin for multiple layer navigation
- fixed some typos in type hints
- fixed some syntax errors
- fixed some typos in comments
- small code refactorings
- Compatibility
-
Supported Magento Versions
Community: 1.8.1.0; 1.9.1.0; 1.9.2c.0Enterprise: 1.12.0.2; 1.13.0.0; 1.14.0.1 - FAQ
-
We've also experienced such problems when we've tested installation via Magento Connect. Simply put, Magento Connect fails to properly extract some of the files from the package archive. The workaround for that is to simply remove directories extracted during the install attempt and then extract directories from archive to the Magento root directory manually. If you want to avoid the extra work you may choose to install the extension manually from the beginning.
The extension covers all the functionality regarding the catalog navigation and fulltext search, including the layer navigation facets and also the advanced search.
There are quite a few features implemented so far, such as: "did you mean" spellchecking, higly configurable autocomplete for quick search, highly configurable multiple filters selection in layer navigation and more to come.
Yes. First of all the extension is shipped with an extensive user manual that offers step by step guidance to install both servers. In addition to that, it comes with two command line tools, one for each of the servers, that assist in the installation and also deployment of the search server configuration, making the server ready for use within Magento in minutes.
The extension ships with theme updates for all the themes that come with the basic Magento installation. Therefore we made sure the frontend works as expected with all the themes provided as default or alternatives for CE 1.8, CE 1.9, EE 1.12, EE 1.13 and EE 1.14. If your custom theme is not far from either of those ones, then adapting layout and skin for it should be very easy. In case you need help with that we are here to help you. Don't hesitate.
Yes, the extension extends the catalog search indexer in that it redirects all the index data to Solr or Elasticsearch instead of MySQL. So all cool features regarding indexing in Magento such as partial reindexing of product save also work with our extension.
No, you don't. The extension relies on and extends the attribute fields that Magento uses to decide whether an attribute is used in quick search or in layer navigation. Therefore you can simply switch to one of the search engines provided by the extension and things will work as expected.
Whenever the search server in use is down, the extension falls back to the default implementation. This means that for the catalog navigation, fulltext search and advanced search, the default MySQL implementation will be used. The extra features, such as the autocomplete, will not be available and the frontend will fall back to the default functionality. Information about the search server failure will be logged into the specific log.
- Reviews
-
Happy with our work? Help us improve, help others decide.
