Module Search system with morphology and relevance PRO for OpenCart

This is a search module  for stores that need high-quality and fast search.  That is, for almost all stores, because with a bad search, stores constantly lose tens of percent of their profits! Your customers won't have to manually browse through tens of thousands of pages on your site to find the right product. If the product is not found in the first seconds through the search, then the user simply leaves your site.

The main features of the module are: very high search speed and good search using morphology and relevance.
The module works great both on large sites with thousands of products, and on sites that work on weak hosting.

How is this module different from other search modules?

Common search modules include: standard  OpenCart search , other search modules, such as the “Search with morphology and relevance” module.

How do they work? After the user has entered a search phrase and clicked the “Search” button, the search module, in order to find all the products that match the search phrase, must go through all the products in the database, and information about each product is not in one, but in several tables with many fields, many of which are not indexed in any  way  .

If you have a few products on the site (tens, hundreds) and a fast server, then your search will work quite quickly.

But if you have thousands of products in the store (or even tens and hundreds of thousands) or not the fastest server, then the more products you have, the slower the search on your site will work. In some cases, 5 and 10 or even more seconds, which of course is a lot, everything that is more than 1-2 seconds is already a lot, users will not wait that long, they will close your site and go to another one.

How does this module work?

This module works on the same principle as search engines, which is why it is called so.
Let's take the Google search engine as an example. After you enter in the search box, for example, “ OpenCart ” and click the “Search” button, Google will show you the results you need in a split second. This is possible because Google does not search for information directly on each site at the time of the search, it has already bypassed all sites and added this information to its very fast databases, where all entries are indexed and lie in the database with the necessary weights (which site to show higher in the search results, which one is lower). After that, Google searches its databases, this makes it possible to find hundreds of thousands of sites in a split second!
This is how this module works. It first goes through all the products in the store and adds all the information to its database tables with indexes.
When a user searches for something on the site, the search does not bypass dozens of fields in thousands of products, but searches only in one table for one indexed field, so the user will receive the result not in a few seconds or even tens of seconds, but in fractions of a second, which is tens and even hundreds of times faster than a standard search.

Morphology and relevance

As you know, the standard  OpenCart search  is just terrible. When searching, it breaks the search phrase into separate words, after which it finds all products that contain any of these words. As a result, when searching for the phrase “ Samsung Monitor ”, the first positions may be “ Acer monitor ” (since the name contains the word “ monitor ”) or “ Samsung laptop ” since the name contains the word “ Samsung ”. While the right product “ Samsung Monitor ” may be somewhere on the 10th page. And if you write in the search not “ laptop ”, but for example. “ laptops ” or misspelling “ Samsung”” then the search will not find anything at all, since the search is carried out only by  the exact occurrence  of the word.

This module is written to fix all the shortcomings of the standard search.

To do this, he has 2 tools:

1. Morphology.  Search is not by exact match, but by the roots of words. Now, having written “laptops” in the search, the search will return all products in which both “laptops” and “laptop” and “laptop”, etc. are found. Supported dictionaries - Russian, Ukrainian, English.
2. Relevance.  When searching, the first positions will be materials with a large total weight. The highest weight has the exact occurrence of the phrase at the beginning of the product name, then the occurrence of one or more words in the name (the more words, the greater the weight), then the occurrence of the word in the tag, then the whole phrase in the description, then a single word in the description. The more matches, the more weight and the higher this product will be in the search results. The weight of each match can be adjusted in the admin panel.

Who needs this module?

• sites that have a lot of products, to increase the quality and speed of search.
• anyone who wants to have a very fast and high-quality search on their site.

Just go to your site's search page, enter a search phrase (of 5-7 words, or more) and click "Search". If you get the search result in more than 1-2 seconds, then you most likely need this module.

Possibilities

• the module is written on the basis of the “Search with morphology and relevance” module, therefore it contains all the huge functionality of that module
• using morphology and relevance for more precise search
• selection of search logic for searching by phrases of several words: AND, OR
• multi store support
• the ability to disable the date of receipt of goods in the search
• different types of search (by word roots and whole words)
• keyboard layout fix mode (“fzzdu” -> “apple”)
• take into account stock availability (out of stock items will be displayed at the end of the search), as well as in version 4 and availability statuses
• the ability to add new search fields, for example, you can add a search by product id, H1 meta, and almost any product field.
• for each field, you can: specify the minimum word length, specify the weight of the occurrence of the word in the beginning or middle of the field
• the ability to exclude certain words from the search
• the ability to replace words when searching (for example, misspelled words: “aple” -> “apple”)
• support for several indexing modes: indexing by krone, automatic indexing after each addition, change, deletion of a product, manual indexing on the module settings page with support for batch creation of indexes (you can start the process and leave the page open for a long time)
• search by entry
• inaccurate search
• the ability to specify specific attributes for the search

What's new in version 4 of the module?

1. Language-insensitive search. Now it is easily enabled in the module settings. Example: if you enter “blanket” in Ukrainian, it will find “kovdri”, etc.
2. The indexing function has been completely rewritten, now indexing works many times, and sometimes ten times faster.
3. The inaccurate search mechanism has been completely rewritten, now it works differently, much better than before. Searches with typos, inaccurate spelling, entry, etc. MySQL version 5.7.6 and higher is required to work.
4. Fixed a bug where a search with a large number of words with the search logic AND on some hostings hung the MySQL server.
5. There are 2 improvements at once:
   - firstly, the search logic has been rewritten AND, now it works many times faster and should no longer load the server
   - secondly, the search query execution time has been added in the settings, if the time is up, the search simply ends.
6. Search by attributes can now be configured, specify which attributes to index and search only for them, and not all at once. There can be 50 attributes in the store, and you need to search only by the “Color” attribute, now this is possible.
7. Sort results by availability - now you can specify specific product statuses for products that are out of stock. You can, for example, remove the products “Out of stock” and “Out of production” from the search results, but leave “On order” and “Expected in 2 days”.
8. It is possible to change the search logic from AND to OR during the search if nothing is found.
9. Improved work of module with Ukrainian language.
10. The design has been improved, additional settings have been moved to a separate tab.
11. Other bugs fixed, some features completely rewritten, as well as other minor changes and improvements.