Question about Solr search and product weighting

[shanetn]

We are working with a Magento partner to get our website re-platformed to Magento.

Currently, we're working on search. We have a pretty large catalog of about 15,000 products. When you search for a keyword, let's say "iPhone", you get results with a bunch of iPhone accessories at the top of the results instead of the actual iPhone itself. But, what we'd prefer is for the smartphones themselves to rank to the top of the results. If someone is searching for an accessory, they would be more specific with their search term, like "iPhone case", which would produce results with cases. What is the best technique to get the smartphones to rank higher in the results than the accessories when both share similar keywords and other fields used for weighting?

Ideally, the search would just rank products in the smartphones category higher by default than those in the accessories categories

The solution that was given by the Magento partner was a free form text field on the products that can be used to enter keywords. However, this would be extremely cumbersome to set up and maintain. Plus, there are a lot of permutations of keywords that could be used to search for various products. So, not ideal at all.

Note, we don't sell smartphones, this is just an example to give an idea of what we're trying to accomplish.

Thanks!

[NirvanaServices]

Technically they are correct but you would use a script to pre-fill the seach terms, you can weight specific fields but it depends on your implementation and what extension you are using. Solr is very accurate, if you have categories with the keywords you can concatenate with those in to a text field. There are many possibilities, you would only manually do it if you have a low product count and you need very high accuracy, with 15,000 it's a volume business so you need to design the rules. It's not complex but you need to go through all the testing permutations to find any strange behaviour as an autoscript will work in 95% of the cases but the other 5% will not be correct, then it is about reducing that number. It really comes down to your product data and what information is available, how accurate the data is, and is it consistent.

[shanetn]

So, there's no way in EE to just tell Magento/Solr that all products in a given category are weighted more heavily?

It sounds like a search extension may be the best option. Any recommendations from those who have used them?

Thanks.

[NirvanaServices]

EE is slightly different, you can add an attribute search weight to mimic it http://docs.magento.com/m1/ee/user_guide/search_seo/search-solr-weighted.html. We helped add an extension before that concatenated data to the search string to increase search quality in Solr, but it would need a weighting added to the categories. Not complex but it's something consultants would have to do, not come across any out of the box.

[S_Franz]

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@shanetn wrote:

 It sounds like a search extension may be the best option. Any recommendations from those who have used them?

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Hi @shanetn!

@NirvanaServices is right, EE only offers boost of product attributes.
Running the risk of being too "advertisy" here, but IntegerNet_Solr might just be what you are looking for. It's a Solr integration for CE and EE, including the option to boost certain products as well as weighting those products more heavily where the category name matches the search term.

DM me for more information.

Cheers!

[shanetn]

Thanks for the recommendation. I'll check it out.

If anyone else has feedback or experience on additional extensions that can improve site search while helping with the challenge I wrote about in my OP, please share.