What's a good site search?
Smart Search Pro has Fulltext searching, which works well when you have more than 10,000 products. It's slightly less accurate, but much faster, than the built-in algorithm. (That algorithm may work fine with 25,000 products, I've seen some sites use it with no issue, but it depends on your setup and your server specs.)
The Pro version can also return category/manufacturer/information page results, so you could show matching categories/manufacturers/pages as well as matching products. The number of categories shouldn't be an issue.
Feel free to take a look at the screenshots and demo site, and if you're interested let me know at www.getclearthinking.com/contact if you have any questions.
The Pro version can also return category/manufacturer/information page results, so you could show matching categories/manufacturers/pages as well as matching products. The number of categories shouldn't be an issue.
Feel free to take a look at the screenshots and demo site, and if you're interested let me know at www.getclearthinking.com/contact if you have any questions.
there are about 20 parent categories, with 10 child categories each. and brands/UPC/SKU are impeccable. Each item has Brand and Category and 2 other slightly more random things as tags.
but i haven't figured out a url fix that i like yet. I'd like to have search results default to canonical if possible. ive seen your extension before, it caught my eye.
We are new to OC but have been running at it about 18 hours a day for 3 months, haha.
So on one hand we are pretty dialed in with what we have done, but have to figure out the next steps in real time.
What do you think we should do about fixing the urls? Ideally id like things to default to canonical on search or browse, and have breadcrumbs work the same whether search or browse.
when you mention accuracy, i understand that to be a give-and-take? If it is "too accurate" it wont have a result, whereas if it is less accurate it could at least suggest something close? Is that correct? In that case i'd prefer less accurate probably.
but i haven't figured out a url fix that i like yet. I'd like to have search results default to canonical if possible. ive seen your extension before, it caught my eye.
We are new to OC but have been running at it about 18 hours a day for 3 months, haha.
So on one hand we are pretty dialed in with what we have done, but have to figure out the next steps in real time.
What do you think we should do about fixing the urls? Ideally id like things to default to canonical on search or browse, and have breadcrumbs work the same whether search or browse.
when you mention accuracy, i understand that to be a give-and-take? If it is "too accurate" it wont have a result, whereas if it is less accurate it could at least suggest something close? Is that correct? In that case i'd prefer less accurate probably.
Smart Search Pro won't redirect to the canonical page if someone searches for the exact category or manufacturer title. It *does* have the ability to redirect to the product page when there is only 1 product result (which is basically what you're describing), so I could potentially do the same for categories/manufacturers, but I haven't tried that before. If you decide to get the extension and want to try it out, let me know and I can send you some pre-release code.
However, I'm not sure I'd really recommend that. When customers run a search, you often can't predict what they're trying to search for, even if it looks like a particular term. For example, if some searched for "Appke" and the only manufacturer result was "Apple", it would end up redirecting them to the Apple brand page. However, they may have meant something else like "Appke" or "App key", so it's safer to just show the results that come from that actual search term. It really depends on how your products are set up, and what you think would be most useful for the customer.
For the breadcrumbs, OpenCart will only show them based on the category/manufacturer (and sub-categories if there is a parent-child category chain). It does include canonical URL meta tags in all pages, so I wouldn't worry *too* much about the breadcrumbs. The canonical meta tag will take care of search engines seeing different URLs as the same page (e.g. www.yourdomain.com/desktops/mac/ will be the same as www.yourdomain.com/mac/).
Lastly, regarding accuracy: if you use Fulltext searching, it show all products/categories/manufacturers with the matching word that is entered. (The normal algorithm also does partial word matching, like "mac" for "macbook", but Fulltext doesn't do that because it's based on using a huge database of words.) If my extension doesn't find anything in Phases 1 and 2, then it does attempt a misspelling search in Phases 3 and 4, which helps it find results. It basically goes from "more accurate" to "less accurate" through the Phases, hoping to find some results.
Hope that helps. Feel free to reach out at www.getclearthinking.com/contact if you have any other questions.
However, I'm not sure I'd really recommend that. When customers run a search, you often can't predict what they're trying to search for, even if it looks like a particular term. For example, if some searched for "Appke" and the only manufacturer result was "Apple", it would end up redirecting them to the Apple brand page. However, they may have meant something else like "Appke" or "App key", so it's safer to just show the results that come from that actual search term. It really depends on how your products are set up, and what you think would be most useful for the customer.
For the breadcrumbs, OpenCart will only show them based on the category/manufacturer (and sub-categories if there is a parent-child category chain). It does include canonical URL meta tags in all pages, so I wouldn't worry *too* much about the breadcrumbs. The canonical meta tag will take care of search engines seeing different URLs as the same page (e.g. www.yourdomain.com/desktops/mac/ will be the same as www.yourdomain.com/mac/).
Lastly, regarding accuracy: if you use Fulltext searching, it show all products/categories/manufacturers with the matching word that is entered. (The normal algorithm also does partial word matching, like "mac" for "macbook", but Fulltext doesn't do that because it's based on using a huge database of words.) If my extension doesn't find anything in Phases 1 and 2, then it does attempt a misspelling search in Phases 3 and 4, which helps it find results. It basically goes from "more accurate" to "less accurate" through the Phases, hoping to find some results.
Hope that helps. Feel free to reach out at www.getclearthinking.com/contact if you have any other questions.
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