One of our shop's major flaws, is the search function. Nor the VM Search, or the breakdesigns CF Search, offer us a satisfactory result so far.
Here's a short list of our important requirements for search:
1) Live AJAX results which 'search as you type'.
2) Search should (allow to) include meta keywords, and custom fields (native or from extensions)
3) Ability to provide alternative words (synonyms) to the keywords found in the products.
e.g. user searches for "tv", and the products called "display" are included in the results
(This point we have not found in any extension so far, and it is very important)
4) Show stats for user searches.[/li][/list]
5) Allow the display of result products, organized by category. Also show categories in the search results. (those are nice-to-haves)
Anyone have anything in mind?
PS. We looked briefly into an ElasticSearch extension for Joomla, but the setup seems horrifyingly complex in the documentation.
Thank you
We bought Elastic Search and implemented for Virtuemart, reprograming, override template....
But after 3 months we deleted, because must pay every month Amazon DB server and it was very expensive for little eshop.
So this year we created new Elastic Search extensions on the own server, meybe if you waiting :D
I tryied a lot of extensions, but any aren`t for really bussines....
I don't think that any extension within Joomla can provide that, without a 3rd party vendor (elastic search, algolia, Shpinx, etc.)
Both the suggestion and the synonyms feature, require Natural Language Processing (aka NLP) algorithms.
It does not seem sensible to me, that any serious business is going to invest capital just to create a joomla extension.
Hence you either have to use/create an extension that consumes those services or alternatively develop a VM plugin that uses the Joomla's smart search, which partially does that.
In the 2nd case Virtuemart should add some plugins triggers, that allows it's content indexing by the smart search plugins.