FIX Magento Search Please!

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Feature request from gfxguru, posted on GitHub Jul 24, 2014

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

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Comment from choukalos, posted on GitHub Aug 05, 2014

@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!

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Comment from barbazul, posted on GitHub Aug 13, 2014

@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: https://github.com/magento/magento2/issues/198#issuecomment-13263767

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Comment from barbazul, posted on GitHub Aug 13, 2014

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.

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Comment from kilsen512, posted on GitHub Sep 27, 2014

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.

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Comment from barbazul, posted on GitHub Sep 27, 2014

@choukalos did you have a chance to look at my technical suggestions? What do you think of them? I think they're small enough they can be thrown in regardless of other bigger search improvements. El 26/09/2014 21:07, "kilsen512" notifications@github.com escribió:

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 synomy up. It would be much more useful if every occurence of that word would be replaced even in search terms with additional words.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/magento/magento2/issues/622#issuecomment-57035016.

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Comment from rtull, posted on GitHub Sep 29, 2014

+1 for global word-based synonyms, AND matching, and stopwords.

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Comment from choukalos, posted on GitHub Sep 30, 2014

@barbazul Thanks for the insights! Stopwords I believe require a mysql compile to change or a SOLR config not sure we can wrap a Gui around that - I'll check with our architects.

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Comment from barbazul, posted on GitHub Oct 01, 2014

Way back I remember using a tool called PHPDig which was a PHP based crawler and search. It did fulltext search but based on its own algorithm instead of mysql native fulltext.

I recon its probably very outdated and underperformant but it supported multi language stopwords.

Since Magento supports multilanguage natively it makes sense it should support multilanguage search.

It shouldn't be to difficult to preprocess the query based on a dictionary regardless of mysql compiled language.

Also, most hosting providers have mysql compiled in english regardless of the target audience so we should work around that limitation El 30/09/2014 11:31, "Charles Choukalos" notifications@github.com escribió:

@barbazul https://github.com/barbazul Thanks for the insights! Stopwords I believe require a mysql compile to change or a SOLR config not sure we can wrap a Gui around that - I'll check with our architects.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/magento/magento2/issues/622#issuecomment-57322620.

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Comment from choukalos, posted on GitHub Jan 09, 2015

@barbazul - thanks for the insights on the PHPDig library ( http://www.phpdig.net/navigation.php?action=demo ); looks like the code hasn't been updated since late 2005. I'll ask our search architect to look into it and how we might further change our search indexer/search algorithm to be more accurate.

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Comment from mattisbusycom, posted on GitHub Jan 09, 2015

I have built an ElasticSearch indexer for a client site; It works amazing and I am currently creating the module (learning how to build Magento modules); but I am very experienced with ElasticSearch in general.