Optimized Search Features
Magento 2 has to Offer

All said and done providing an ease of search functionality is the order of the day for eCommerce stores. We receive many queries as to how can we optimize Magento search features.
A lot of this depends on the size of the catalog you have to offer. These aspects decide whether it is viable for you to opt for specialist or take care of the inbuilt Magento 2 native search features if you have the bandwidth.
To make your decision making easy we have identified some core search functionality present in Magento 2. These features pack a punch and certainly makes Magento 2 stand out from the crowd.

• Managing synonyms is easy in Magento 2

  In this aspect, there is not much change the way synonyms are handled compared to its predecessor Magento 1. The ease of managing synonyms in Magento 2 makes it a great platform to handle long tail search queries, which is the order of the day.
  This is a great boost for intent-based search. Google is advocating this on its search platform. This search feature of Magento 2 does not let you lose a customer who types ‘hoodie’ instead of ‘sweathshirt’.
  This is a native functionality for Magento and we suggest ecommerce businesses to spend the time to research and optimize this functionality.

• Ease of Quick Search

  Ecommerce shoppers come is various personas. Many customers do not know the name of the product they want except for the functionality. The typical search of such eCommerce shoppers goes like this.

  • Enter the first few letters of the product
  • Just clicks on the suggested searches
  • Enters a wrong name and clicks on the search results thrown at them

  Magento 2 being the perfect eCommerce machine gets this bang on target. The default quick search functionality provided by Magento 2 autocompletes such kind of searches and eases the shopping journey of your customer.
  This search functionality is available in the header section of the Magento 2 store because the prime product search begins from there.

• Ability to do a weighted search

  This is a very interesting search function provided in Magento 2. The eCommerce merchants can actually provide weight to the search attributes.
  Say for example a shopper types ‘Black suede jacket’ in the search box. This weighted search function actually throws result based on the weight allotted to those search terms.
  Suede attribute would be allocated 5 points and black shoe attribute would be allocated 3 points. The results are thrown in based on this weighted average. In this case, the results for the material suede would be shown first followed by black (color attribute) and shoes.

• Advance search

  We don’t advice advanced search for all shoppers. This is a specific function designed for ecommerce shoppers who do not want to spend much time browsing. Magento 2 achieves this function to the ‘T’.
  Configuring the advanced search function in Magento 2 is a very crucial factor for this. The advanced search functionality of Magento 2 shows the results that are specific to the values specified by the shopper in the form.
  The advanced search function of Magento 2 eases the search of your shoppers by throwing in results even if the form is partially filled. If the shopper finds the search results to be inadequate they can further narrow down or modify the search filter criteria.
  Advanced search of Magento 2 shows the results based on the criteria set by the shopper and layered navigation. Setting apt filters is very crucial for advanced search to play its role.

• Ease of integrating third-party search extensions

  Magento is an open source community and there is a number of excellent third party solutions which can be integrated into the store.
  Before beginning your search and opting for a third party Magento search extension be sure to evaluate them on the following features.

  • Error tolerance, because a very large amount of search queries are error-prone.
  • Ease of synonym management
  • Ability to handle B2B nuances and jargons.
  • Provision to manually promote products
  • Neutral language processing to provide accurate results for long tail queries
  • Auto-suggest UI functionality

Make sure to go to our blog covering top 5 features of Magento 2.

Conclusion

i95Dev helped many eCommerce companies design and build search functions to suit their needs. We have deep experience in strategizing, planning and executing a Magento development lifecycle. We helped many companies build customized ecosystems to suit their needs. The ERPs they use include Dynamics GP, NAV, AX, SAGE 100 and SAP B1. We have customers who are on various versions of Magento, both on Community Edition and Enterprise Edition and at different levels of growth cycles.