Inside Magento #7 - Product Search
The first thing a majority of your customers will do on your site is search for a product, and you want to make sure that you can give them the best search experience possible. We’re here to help. Magento’s search lets Store Owners get the most out of their search capabilities, and helps your Customers find exactly the item they’re searching for as quickly and easily as possible.
Magento will provide on-the-fly auto-completion of searches, giving suggested search terms and number of results directly below the search box. As a customer types printer, for example, the search box will fill in relevent searches with result totals, such as in the screenshot of Google Search below:
Magento also features advanced search, which allows Customers to search by Product Attributes defined by you, the Store Owner (for example: price range, manufacturer, category, etc). You’ll also have the ability to redirect certain search terms (to a custom landing page for advertising purposes, for example), and create synonyms for frequently misspelled words (typing “Mangeto” will automatically switch to “Magento,” for example), leaving complete control of the site’s search system in your hands.
This is only the beginning of where Magento can take your site’s search system. In the future, the search will allow for misspellings, alternate spellings, and plurals of search keywords, helping your customers find exactly what they want.
Stay tuned for next week when you get to meet us, the team behind Magento, in the new Magento Videos and a brand new Magento website! You won’t want to miss them!
1Jonah |posted July 3 2007
Will you be using advanced search applications like Apache Lucene?
2roy from Los Angeles, CA|posted July 3 2007
Jonah - yes. Although not initially, this is certainly expected and will allow for really great search functionality. Thanks.
3Geof Harries |posted July 3 2007
One thing that I’ve always found awkward about live search is successfully moving the cursor from the form field to a result in the list without dropping your results.
This is usually because the target (or hit zone) is not always big enough to forgive user mistakes. Being Varien and all, I figure you have this covered, but just wanted to make sure…
4jeff |posted July 5 2007
This is an unrelated question, but what payment gateways will be supported with the release of the product?
5roy from Los Angeles, CA|posted July 5 2007
Jeff - we expect to have Verisign, Authorize.net, Paypal, and Google Checkout available initially, with support for many other US and international providers in the coming months.
6Simon |posted July 5 2007
Will it be possible to build our own payment support in from launch? We use a few different UK providers and would want to build in our support for those from the launch if possible…
7roy from Los Angeles, CA|posted July 5 2007
Simon - sure. You can certainly develop code to support any gateway you wish.
8Simon |posted July 5 2007
That’s good news - let us at it!
9ilan |posted July 5 2007
Roy, Magento is looking better and better every day. Have you decided on a license for the project?
10roy from Los Angeles, CA|posted July 6 2007
ilan - yes (and thank you for asking). Magento will be licensed under OSL 3.0 (open software license). Community contributions will be licensed under AFL 3.0 (academic free license).
We’ll have a more formal post on this issue in the next few weeks.
11ojt |posted July 10 2007
Hmm, I could possibly be interested in helping with various country specific payment gateways. Altho, for most countries those coming in the initial release are sufficent.
I had italy and finland in mind here, things like PostePay, BancaSella and paying through one’s eBank account in finland..
Let me know if I can do something?
Cheers,
still looking good
12Joe |posted July 10 2007
Hello,
Haven’t heard from you guys for a while now, and already miss you!
What previews do you prepare for us?
Thanks, Joe.
13Allande |posted July 11 2007
"Stay tuned for next week when you get to meet us, the team behind Magento, in the new Magento Videos and a brand new Magento website! You won’t want to miss them!”
Available date ? I am impatient…
14roy from Los Angeles, CA|posted July 11 2007
Allande - very soon, within 48 hours for sure. We are putting the final touches as we speak.
We’ll post a blog item as soon as its up, so if you are reading the blog via RSS, you’ll know right away.
Thanks again.
15Hal Smith |posted July 11 2007
Thanks for the update Roy. Can’t wait to read more about Magento.
16John |posted August 15 2007
Will it be possible for Magento to keep track of all the searches people have done, and give admins the ability to see what people are searching for?
That would be valuable info to have for a store owner.
17YoavKutner |posted August 16 2007
John - The Search Management tool in Magento allows the store owner to view all search terms submitted by customers alongside with how many times the specific search term was used and how many results were returned the last time it was requested. The store owner can then assign synonyms to a search term, such as assigning the misspelling ‘shrit’ to the search term ‘shirt’.
There is even an option to redirect a specific search term to a specified landing page. If someone enters the search term ‘Nike’ in a online shoe store the store owner can redirect this search result to a specially created Nike landing page, rather than listing all products that match the search term ‘Nike’.
18John |posted August 16 2007
Wow, you guys have thought of everything. Thanks for the detailed response Yoav!