Magento

Go for this extension! Works Excellently Well!

http://www.magecoders.com/index.php/enhanced-default-search-for-magento.html

Hi,

In fact, Magenta search is not perfect. Very often a user doesn’t find what he was looking for and leaves the store. Good decision is to integrate the Sphinx search engine. It greatly improves the quality and relevance of search results. Look at http://mirasvit.com/magento-extensions/magento-sphinx-search.html

jemoon - 15 December 2010 02:48 AM

Hi,
Just to let you know - I have found a solution I think that developers have made some mistake because comparing to previous versions it looks that in app/code/core/Mage/CatalogSearch/Model/Mysql4/Fulltext.php on line 342 should be:

$likeCond = '(' . join(' AND ', $like) . ')';

instead:

$likeCond = '(' . join(' OR ', $like) . ')';

Just change the line like I posted above re-compile your shop and reindex search index - works for me

for magento 1.7 file change on app/code/core/Mage/CatalogSearch/Model/Resource/Fulltext.php

Hey guys, although this is a more technical post, I’d like to share the way I fixed my search results.

Magento’s search engine is actually very good, you just have to customize your Magento attributes so that the search will work any way you want.

Basically, Magento comes with some unnecessary attributes set to be “searchable” in the store. Some of these are the short description, description and so on.

All you have to do to improve search results is go to: CATALOG - ATTRIBUTES - MANAGE ATTRIBUTES

Filter results to show only “searchable: YES” attributes and you will discover which attributes are searchable in quick or advanced search. You can then edit attributes so they will not be searchable.

What I did to make my searches great (quick search especially) was to leave only MANUFACTURER, NAME and SKU as searchable, and added META KEYWORDS to that as well.

With this rule setup, I can add the special - or different - keywords you need for each product in their META KEYWORD field.

For example, if someone searches for “iPhone” they will only find iPhones and related products which have this string in the name. If they search for Apple, they will find all apple manufactured products and if they search for “Smartphone” they will find all smartphones because all smartphones in the store have this string in their META KEYWORD fields.

You might think this will affect SEO, but it doesn’t. Google (the most important search engine) does not consider this meta tag relevant for ranking. Actually, they ignore the META KEYWORDS tag so this will basically be useful in your own website or some funky old search engines out there.

With this technique, you can customize search results to work the way you need.

Another idea would be to include the “URL KEY” as a searchable attribute, since you usually put important and exclusive keywords there for each product.

It worked like a charm for me!!

Best of luck! Eduardo