How to Improve Magento Search: Useful Insights & Extensions

The platform provides standard search out of the box that gives you the option to modify and control your search results webpage; however, it would be wrong to claim that it’s perfect.

Those who use Magento 2.4 can find the pre-installed Elasticsearch 7 module of help, which you can use as a catalog search solution. It hasn’t undergone significant changes in comparison with the previous version from a functional point of view.

There are several ways to upgrade the native search in Magento. The primary step you could start with is to familiarize yourself with Magento’s search methods and select the right one.

Importance of In-Depth Research

There is one more way to optimize Magento native search, which is time-consuming but worth it.

Take your time with the data and configure attributes to match the consumers’ behavior. Gather information and analyze-analyze-and-analyze it!

Consider what terms are your shoppers looking for most frequently in your store? Where do they make mistakes? How can you help purchasers to find the items they want? And, then following on from the results of your research, improve the website’s functionality.

Areas of Improvement

As you see, you can dramatically improve the standard Magento search; however, it still tends to lack the advanced functionality and high-level system support required to produce highly relevant product lists.

You can change it if you want to bring in search optimization by installing extensions that will add advanced functions and make the customer experience more pleasant.

There are several main areas of Magento search to be extended:

#1 Relevant results

Relevance of search results is vital for user trust and loyalty. Your customers should encounter the items they want to purchase when searching your site. If they don’t, they’ll look elsewhere. All the work and time you’ve spent will be for naught.

#2 Tolerance of misspellings

It’s common for people to make spelling mistakes when searching for items. By understanding typos and misspelling, error tolerance dramatically improves UX and retains the shopper on your site. It is an excellent option to demonstrate the misspelled search term alongside the correct spelling.

#3 Use of labels or synonyms

It is a remarkable ability to add synonyms for search queries so that customers will see terms commonly used across the catalog. For example, if the word ‘bike’ is not common in attributes indexed in search, you can have this as a synonym for ‘bicycle’ if that is a general term used in product titles and descriptions.

#4 Magento 2 Autocomplete Search/Suggest

Auto-complete suggestions are great time savers for shoppers.

This feature lets store visitors view the list of the most relevant results right after the first characters appear in the search box. The search box drop-down menu usually arranges and displays results.

Auto-complete for site searches is especially worth considering if you have numerous products.

You can also display recommended results inside the search box that match the auto-completed search queries, enabling customers to click directly into a product’s detail page without having to look through a search results page.

#5 Search speed

None likes waiting — even very loyal customers. If customers have to wait for the search results too long, there are two scenarios: they leave or get frustrated. Both of them are not good, so you should also include this issue in your what-to-improve list.

Suppose you have a highly loaded store and hundreds of search requests per second. In that case, we highly recommend using search platforms and the services based on them that replace core Magento products/content search and boast extra features and better performance.

Below is the list of the most used search platforms and solutions and extensions to integrate them with Magento websites.

#1 Doofinder

Doofinder is a SaaS company whose technology aims to improve the internal eCommerce search process. Its integration is easy and fast, allowing online shops to increase their sales by offering effective and relevant results.

With the Magento Site Search extension you will be able to offer advanced search in more than 40 languages, display banners and promotions associated with specific terms, and also get optimized search results even on mobile devices, always having real time statistics.

All in just one installation without coding and in less than 5 minutes.

#2 Solr

Apache Solr is an open-source search platform.

In comparison to the standard search of Magento, Solr differentiates itself through significantly higher performance.

Its top features involve efficient full-text and faceted search, filtering, hit highlighting, optimization for high traffic websites, built-in security, performance optimizations.

#3 ElasticSearch

ElasticSearch is a flexible and powerful open-source, distributed, real-time search and analytics engine.

This search engine is the second most popular enterprise search engine, which provides scalable search, has near real-time search, and supports multi-tenancy.

#4 Sooqr

Sooqr is a paid service that enables extreme fast search for online shops and generates relevant results. The spelling corrector ensures that the search takes place using the proper term, keeps track of the way your visitors’ search so that the website owners can get an excellent insight into the usage of your site search.

Apart from Magento, Sooqr also offers search solutions for Shopware and Woocommerce.

#5 SLI Learning Search

Learning Search is an advanced, SaaS-based site search solution. SLI is an acronym meaning ‘Search, Learn and Improve.’

SLI Systems’ patented learning technology learns from visitors’ site search activity and clicks to deliver the most relevant results. By tracking every query and clicks, Learning Search improves relevance and reduces the time it takes customers to find what they’re seeking. It has many more great functions.

#6 Sphinx

Sphinx is an open-source full-text search server, and for those who might confuse it with the Great Sphinx of Giza, Sphinx is the acronym for SQL Phrase Index. Sphinx search has many advantages like high relevance, the flexibility of sorting results, performance, and allows normalizing the spelling variations, synonyms and abbreviation.

#7 Algolia

Algolia positions itself as an AI-based search solution that aims to give a personalized touch to their communications with purchasers.

The solution is also compatible with Shopify, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, and Netlify, apart from Magento.

More than 150 extensions currently available on Magento’s official marketplace cover almost every aspect of the search experience and offer functions that sometimes even don’t come to mind. Every day several new extensions created by Magento partners and enthusiasts are added.

Which one to choose? It’s so easy to get lost among the variety of search extensions. So we decided to help you out with this a little bit and listed several solutions that can come in handy.

#1 Sooqr Search

Here’s a list of crucial functional benefits:

• ✓ Option to add the most relevant matches first
• ✓ High speed of displaying results
• ✓ Instant error correction in queries
• ✓ In-depth and systematic search analytics

Price: free

#2 Ajax Autocomplete & Search

Main benefits of using the extension cover:

• ✓ Returning real-time results
• ✓ Full control over the design of the search results box
• ✓ Minimum number of characters required to activate the search
• ✓ Show/hide product price & description in search results
• ✓ Allows including custom CSS in the search header and footer

Price: $199/year

#3 Product Search Suggestion

What’s inside:

• ✓ Search by tags, product titles, and categories
• ✓ Popular products displayed based on ratings
• ✓ Searched keyword highlighted in results
• ✓ AJAX-based technology

Price: $79

#4 Sphinx Search Ultimate for Magento 2

The highlight features include:

• ✓ Great relevance of results
• ✓ Incredible search autocomplete speed
• ✓ Automatic correction of typing errors
• ✓ Searching by various content types and for different languages
• ✓ Stop words and synonyms usage
• ✓ Hyphens/slashes usage while searching

Price: $249–$448

#5 Magento 2 Elasticsearch Extension

What is under the hood:

• ✓ Incredible speed of displaying proper search results
• ✓ Rapid search with autocomplete
• ✓ Automatic correction of errors
• ✓ Search across different content types

Price: $249

Take advantage of additional search features and increase your profits. According to the research conducted by Moz, users who use on-site search make for about 2x conversions than those that don’t use it.

If you have any questions or issues related to improving the native functionality or feel worried that the Magento search is not working as expected, reach out to the reliable Magento development partner.