We use a fulltext search engine Sphinx. It provides high indexation speed and great amount of simultaneously processed queries. Which as a result gives you super fast search with our widgets!
An interesting fact is that Sphinx was developed for searching songs by the lines taken from their lyrics. This perfectly explains how our search works.
At first all the variants with exact match of the full search phrase are shown. For example, if you are searching for the song “Eye of the tiger”, search engine checks for each words from this phrase. The problem is you can find the word “eye” in many songs (“Can’t take my eyes off of you”, “Behind blue eyes” and other great ones). However, you need exactly the “Eye of the tiger” song and nothing else. That’s why the full match is shown first.
Consequently, if you use Searchanise and enter the name of a unique product from your store, it will be the first to be shown in search results. Then partial matching product will be shown.
Search checks all the indexed elements of your store. These are products, categories, articles 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 full text search?
Just imagine a big 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 process of full text search 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 Sphinx description.
More facts about our Smart Search
Searchanise supports search by substring. For example, due to this feature you can search by parts of SKUs.
You can check it on our demo.
Just type a part of this SKU: 53743538403 in order to find the product HILL'S BOLAS DE PELO CON POLLO ADULTO GATO.
The suggestions in our instant search widget are generated 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 of the Searchanise admin panel. The other suggestions cannot be deleted because they are auto-generated.