One of the questions we get asked the most is about Magento’s search function. A lot of store owners know by now that the default search function integrated into Magento is crap. There really are no other words to describe it. It takes ages to load the search results (visitors hate waiting and slow websites), and the results it displays are often completely unrelated to your search query. Luckily, there are some awesome search extensions available for Magento that do a much better job at serving the customer the products he is searching for in your store, which will result in more sales. We have tested a few and have come up with a list of the best search extensions for Magento.
| Image | Name | Price | Rating |
|---|---|---|---|
 | Magento Search Autocomplete and Suggest | $$$ | 5.0 out of 5.0 |
 | Search Pro - Magento Advanced Search | $$$$ | 4.9 out of 5.0 |
Magento Search Autocomplete and Suggest
The Search Autocomplete & Suggest extension not only gives your visitors better search results, it also autocompletes search query’s and suggests other related search terms to the customer. This will help the visitor to narrow down exactly what he is looking for. It also has the ability to search in a lot more areas than the default Magento search, which only looks for the keyword in the title & description. This extension is able to search in text attributes like:
- product name
- description
- SKU
- meta data
- etc.
This is great because it gives your search feature a lot more data to work with, which will in return display more accurate search results. While the client is searching for its product, he gets a sneak peek of the products that the search query has returned thus far. A small thumbnail, price, and the product title are displayed which are all clickable and redirect to the product page. See the picture for an example.
Some other great features of this extension are the ability to limit items displayed in the drop-down sneak peek, advanced results sorting (alphabet, price, relevance, rating), hiding of out of stock products, AJAX based (no page refresh), searching by product tags, open search results in new browser tab, fully customizable CSS, Open Source code and translation support.
Search Pro – Magento Advanced Search
This extension finishes second on our list. It’s still very good so it’s recommended that you also check this one out to make a comparison as to which one fits your needs the best. The installation of this extension went smooth and there were no issues with it. Although it has a lot fewer features than the other extension above, it still significantly increases the relevance of search results your Magento store returns.
A good feature of this extension is the ability to specify the query relevance to a search result. You can set it to Like (looks like, sounds like), Fulltext (matches exactly) or combined (a combination of both). You can also specify the relevance and priority of attributes. This extension also has an autocomplete window, with an add to cart button directly added to it which is very nice.
So, there you have our view on the search extensions for Magento that are out there. We hope you have made a good choice in implementing the extension in your Magento store. If you need help with the installation of an extension, do not hesitate to contact us via the contact form on our website.
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