How our search works

We use a full-text Sphinx search engine. It provides high indexation speed and a significant amount of simultaneously processed queries. As a result, it gives you a super-fast search with our widgets! Interestingly, Sphinx was developed for searching songs by the lines taken from their lyrics. That perfectly explains how our search works. At first, all the variants with exact matches of the whole phrase are shown. For example, if you are searching for the song named “Eye of the tiger”, the search engine checks each word from this phrase. The problem is as you can find the “eye” word in many songs (“Can’t take my eyes off of you“, “Behind blue eyes“, and other great ones). However, you want to find only the “Eye of the tiger” song and nothing else. That’s why the variants with exact matches of this phrase will be shown first. So, if you use Searchanise and enter the name of a unique product from your store into a search bar, it will be shown in search results at the top. Only after that, the partial matching product will be shown. The search engine checks all the indexed elements of your store. These are products, categories (collections), articles (pages), and blog posts. What is more, our search is case-insensitive, so it is not necessary to reproduce the case of the desired search results. What is a full-text search? Imagine an extensive dictionary where articles on each word include a list of documents containing this word. Roughly speaking, that’s how the results of indexation look. In the full-text search process, a word with the list of document numbers is found, and then the results from these documents are shown. As you can see from the example above, information on the word position and other details are also stored in this so-called dictionary. If you’re curious about how it works and not afraid to look into the core, you can have a look at the Sphinx description. More facts about our Smart Search Searchanise supports search by substring. For example, you can search by parts of SKUs. You can check it on our demo. Just type a part of this SKU: 494984 to find the Slim Winter Jacket product. The suggestions in our Instant Search Widget generates automatically. They are based on Hunspell dictionaries, the indexed content of your site, and the history of searches. As you may know, you can add (and delete as well) your own suggestions in the Suggestion dictionary section.

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