Smart Search
Products -> Smart Search allows you to manage and set Smart Search parameters.
The Smart Search engine is fast and accurate. It is built for ecommerce. It uses a proprietary indexing system to easily handle hundreds of thousands of products and return relevant results. Without an index, a search must go through every product one by one, which takes a considerable amount of time and computing power, especially on larger sites. For example, an index search of 1000 products can be queried within milliseconds, where a full table scan of 1000 products can take several minutes and will often time out the server.
Indexing
Products -> Smart Search contains two tabs. The first is the index. Indexing your site takes the words from your product titles, descriptions, attributes, etc., and builds a searchable indexed database.
If you add products through a CSV import, or other direct database connection you must go to Products -> Smart Search and re-index your site. When adding products through the admin interface the index is automatically updated.
In the indexing section you can view the search index of your site for each language you have:
Each language will display the number of words indexed for this language, the last time the database was indexed, and a button to manually rebuild the search index.
Clicking on 'Word Count' will take you to a separate page where you can view each word indexed on your site, and view each product that contains the indexed words.
The Index only new products checkbox controls if the indexing is a complete reset, or if only new products are indexed.
Relevancy
When a customer searches for a product at your site using the Smart Search, an algorithm is applied to find the most relevant results based on your product data. Every word that matches your search query in your product titles, summary, descriptions, attributes, and keywords is weighted according to its significance. A word that is present in many product descriptions or titles has a lower semantic value and will be sorted lower by relevancy. Conversely, if the word is rare, it receives a higher weight and the products containing this word will be sorted higher in the relevancy results.
Additionally, a word in a title is more relevant than a word in a long description. And a keyword is weighted higher than a word found in a summary. All of these weights can be adjusted in the Smart Search admin section.
This technique works better as the collection of words grow. The more information that is contained in the Smart Search index the better the Smart Search words index model is able to determine the most relevant matches.
Boolean Mode Searches
The Smart Search supports Boolean searches. This is a method of searching where mathematical operators or words are used to include, omit, or change the weight of certain words. In addition, quotation marks can be used to search for exact text matches. For example, lets use the search phrase red -shirt. This search would return products with the matching word red, and would block all products that contained the word shirt.
Boolean operators are:
+ A word that is directly preceded by a + is required for a product to match
- A word that is directly preceded by a - will block all products that contain this word from displaying in the results..
" Words surrounded by double quotes must match the exact phrase in quotes for a product to be a match.
Multiple Boolean operators can be combined in a single search query.
For example:
A search for "red shirt" would only match products that contained the exact phrase red shirt. It would not return a product with the phrase red polo shirt .
A search for +red +shirt would only return products that contained the words red and shirt, but they would not need to be an exact phrase. A product with red polo shirt in the description would be returned in this search.
Settings
The Smart Search settings can be found in Settings -> Smart Search.
The following options are available:
The following options are available:
Minimum Characters: The smallest number of characters a word can have to be included in the search index. Typically, you do not want to index words like a, an, or, the, so by setting the minimum character to 3 you avoid doing so.
Automatically Combine Words: Automatically combine words in a search query. Example: Mc Donald will also search for McDonald.
Enable Did You Mean: When a word in a search query is not found in your store's database the closest match will be displayed (spell correction).
Search Singular and Plural: Include singular and plural forms of each word in the search query.
Punctuation to Strip: All characters in this list will be filtered out of the search index, and ignored when a customer enters them.
Display Similar Search Phrases: Display similar search phrases (Other close search words) at the bottom of each search)
Smart Search Tag Cloud: Displays a visual design of the most popular words found in the product description(s) of the search results
Require Exact Match: A product must match every word in the query for it to display in the search results.
Search By Productid: Search by productid on numeric searches
Wildcard SKU: When a word in a search query contains at least a number and letter, it is converted to a wildcard SKU that will also display a product for a partial SKU match.
Weights
The Smart Search assigns a weight to each searchable field on your site. You can then adjust the importance of a match in each individual section to improve the relevancy of the results on your store.
The weighted sections are:
- Title
- Summary
- Description
- Keywords
- SKU
- Attributes (Options / Variants)
If your site has a lot of unique highly customized data in the description field, you will want to give this a higher weight. Likewise if you have a lot of redundant common information in the summary field, you can lower the relevancy of a match in this section.
The Smart Search helps to make your store easy to search and reduces customer frustration.
The Smart Search helps to make your store easy to search and reduces customer frustration.