Better Search Please!! NOW

[gfxguru]

Search is huge. We've tried for years to come up with a decent search for magento. How can we increase search "related results" and search efficiency?

[hectorj]

I'm not a search specialist, but it could be an idea to use Zend_Lucene search engine instead of the one currently in use (which I found give poor results).
It seems pretty easy to use, I don't know about its performances and its quality of results.

EDIT : After some research, it seems that Lucene is very criticized about its speed with large amount of data.

[alexander-sibert]

A search integration for sphinx and apache solr will be nice. In Germany we have some ready extension for apache solr.

[dadoonet]

Did you look at: https://github.com/jreinke/magento-elasticsearch? It could help.

[gfxguru]

Yes I have looked at ES. Java based and will not install java on a server - "Not up for discussion"
Why can't we just fix search capabilities so we're not looking to add-on a specific capability

[paales]

I doubt this will be implemented since the SOLR search is already part of Magento EE. A somewhat better algorithm would be nice though, so that the the search engine isn't completely useless.

[gfxguru]

I totally agree with paales on this. actually kinda like to know more about SOLR and CE. I've looked into this a little but trying to think about maintenance in the long run... na .

[magento-team]

There are several great Magento extensions that improve search or integrate with Solr not only for improved performance but also better results like SolrGento or you can integrate with a 3rd party solution that will also provide searchandizing functionality. Improving search is not on our roadmap right now but if someone is willing to contribute improvements we will try to incorporate them.

[vdubyna]

Is it a problem to implement at least search by whole phrase. In other words allow developer to choose what strategy for search should be "OR" or "AND"
Example: search "Red pen" should return only red pens, but not all other pens.
We have already customized it tons of times.

As for the solr and sphinx - extensions should cover that and support new versions of that engines

[FiveDigital]

@vdubyna +1 for that! We always have to change the search strategy to "AND" because the search results are useless, as soon as someone uses a space in the search term.

[Detzler]

@vdybuna +1

[gabrielqs]

Better store search (paid extension) has a great approach on catalog
search, and it doesnt rely on any external software.

Is it possible to do something similar?

Gabriel Queiroz
On Feb 6, 2013 5:36 PM, "Detzler" [email protected] wrote:

@vdybuna +1

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com//issues/198#issuecomment-13200633.

[barbazul]

@vdubyna Magento search in FULL TEXT mode is run in BOOLEAN mode, which means it supports the use of operators such as quotes to search for literal phrases

I actually found this to be a problem on certain catalogs where NATURAL LANGUAGE MODE would return richer results. Nevertheless I think BOOLEAN mode allows for somewhat easily plugging in customized behavior to alter the query or even playing with the synonym engine (such as making 'apple' a synonym for '+apple ~macintosh' where it searches for all documents containing 'apple' but reduces relevance for any document containing 'macintosh'). This sort of fine tuning requires a lot of knowledge of your catalog contents and customer behavior and expectations, but it is really powerful when mastered.

What bothers me is that BOOLEAN MODE should not be hardcoded into the query. It should be rather simple to make BOOLEAN / NATURAL LANGUAGE / QUERY EXPANSION modes configurable from the admin panel as they have a lot of impact in the quantity and quality of the results and could be the first step in fine-tuning catalog search

[magento-team]

Hello everyone, thanks for the interesting feedback. Unfortunately we don't have search improvements on our short term roadmap - so we encourage any of you to provide pull requests with suggested changes.

[verklov]

Closing the issue due to the absence of activity.

[gfxguru]

We need to reopen this. Search is Magento biggest fault. Please do not dismiss others content included within this thread. This is an issue with Magento and it is not fixed. Please do not close this thread until such time! Thank you.

[kandy]

First of all, Magento is open platform. Better way do not add any feature when everyone can implement it by self, especially when it is very difficult to make universal. Just use google search, it will force you to make the site better visible to search engines and kill two birds with one stone.

[alankent]

This GitHub ticketing system is not used to manage the strategic planning backlog for Magento 2. That is maintained internally. There are several Search ideas on the internal backlog. We then trade off where to invest available resource between different items on the backlog in an Agile manner. So I wanted to confirm that Search is definitely on the internal backlog. Closing GitHub tickets does not (always) mean we have thrown an idea out - they are frequently copied to the internal backlog the closed here to stop clogging up this ticketing system. Sorry for any confusion. Community feedback and passion is definitely listened to and valued. Magento is successful if people using it are successful. The challenge is always trading off between so many good ideas that get put forward.

[FiveDigital]

Good to hear this 👍

[gfxguru]

The more I hear the mage-team talk about this as not an issue in Magento the more upsetting it is. If you've never worked with search before in your life, then I could see why you may think Magento search is sufficient. I don't believe that's the case. I believe the amount of work involved in fixing search is the issue here. Plus with search being Magento's #1 weakness's "IMO" why would you not seek to improve it? How about working with the community to make it a bit easier to possibly integrate a search platform into Magento? This is almost impossible giving the way mage-team is using github as more of a platform showcase instead of a community or social coding platform.
.....And for anyone wondering, Solr looks to be a bit platform dependent at first glance, Spinx search is starting to look promising, but the chance of trying to integrate any type of module/extension using your way of publishing builds, looks like an impossible task...that's my 2 cents...

[gfxguru]

and i did not realize the "#" symbol was github's shortcode to the actual issue..learn something every day..

[choukalos]

Hi @gfxguru , as @alankent stated our backlog has quite a # of search features to the core search experience. We're currently focused on the platform now so have been working mostly on making it easy to create/substitute your own search engine. Later we'll revisit how we handle search queries in our MySQL search engine implementation as part of adding those search features. Do you have any example queries - example data - pros/cons for the different types that can help our architects identify an appropriate architecture or impact on adding such a configuration parameter?

Thanks
P.S.: I'm the product manager for Mangento Search

[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.

[lukebranch]

@gfxguru I recommend you look at some of the community projects available to override or enhance the in-built search capabilities of Magento in the meantime. From my experience Sphinx is by far the easiest to implement and there are a handful of sphinx/magento community projects out there. I've listed a couple that can be found at the following github links:

https://github.com/fheyer/sphinxsearch
https://github.com/novalis111/sphinxmage

[ihor-sviziev]

Also we have CE extensions for elasticsearch:
https://github.com/jreinke/magento-elasticsearch
https://github.com/magento-hackathon/Elasticgento
https://github.com/magento-hackathon/elasticsearch

[choukalos]

@igor-svizev @gfxguru @kandy @FiveDigital @paales @Detzler @dadoonet @hectorj (+anyone else I missed). As I stated we're planning post 2.x work for search and I have a question. For search reports it sounds like merchants want to look at specific (recent) time periods to see if their tweaks to search have improved results. If we put a quick pick for time frame in the search results what should we use as options ( in order of your priority )? An example might be; yesterday, last 7 days, last week, last month.

Thanks!

[barbazul]

The time frames listed sound ok.

I dont think the reporting is very relevant anyways as most merchants turn
to Google Analytics for reports (reporting is Magento's second biggest
flaw).
El 19/09/2014 10:33, "Charles Choukalos" [email protected]
escribió:

@igor-svizev https://github.com/igor-svizev @gfxguru
https://github.com/gfxguru @kandy https://github.com/kandy
@FiveDigital https://github.com/fivedigital @paales
https://github.com/paales @Detzler https://github.com/Detzler
@dadoonet https://github.com/dadoonet @hectorj
https://github.com/hectorj (+anyone else I missed). As I stated we're
planning post 2.x work for search and I have a question. For search reports
it sounds like merchants want to look at specific (recent) time periods to
see if their tweaks to search have improved results. If we put a quick pick
for time frame in the search results what should we use as options ( in
order of your priority )? An example might be; yesterday, last 7 day s,
last week, last month.

Thanks!

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