In Magento, the Store Owner has complete control over the catalog’s Search. This includes the ability to designate which aspects of which products the search can access, as well as capability to instruct the search to display different results or even a different website. There are two search options available to your customers: Quick Search and Advanced Search.
Quick Search
Quick search is available to your customers via the search bar at the top of the header in the front-end.
What the In-Store Search looks for
When conducting a search, results will populate based on matches in any of a searchable product’s searchable attributes (yes, there are separate search settings for both products and attributes). Because all characteristics of a product are considered attributes – such as the name, description, and color – you can search for anything related to any product.
Simply make sure that the product is searchable by:
1. In the Admin, navigate to Catalog > Manage Products.
2. Click the Edit link under the desired product.
3. Locate the Visibility dropdown and select either Search or Catalog, Search.
4. Click Save.
And make sure that the attribute is searchable by:
1. In the Admin, navigate to Catalog > Attributes > Manage Attributes.
2. Click on the desired attribute.
3. Click Properties in the left column.
4. In the Use in quick search drop-down, select Yes.
5. Click Save Attribute.
When the customer types a set of characters into the search field, the query will locate any occurrence of those characters in the order which they were typed, anywhere within an attribute. For example, if your customer created a search for tie rack, and you had a product description containing the words necktie racks, your customer’s search would yield this product as a result, because their search term is contained in order within the attribute: necktie racks. An additional feature of Magento Search is that as soon as your customer has typed two characters into the search field, a
dropdown window will appear listing up to ten suggested search terms that begin with the same characters, along with the amount of results for each term. You will find more about how to customize this feature below.
Saving a Search Term
All saved search terms can be accessed in the Admin by navigating to Catalog > Search. There are two ways for a search term to be saved to this page. All search terms used by a customer in the store will automatically save here. Additionally, you can manually enter a search term that you believe will be useful to your customers.
From the Store
When a customer types any set of characters into the Search Bar at the top of the page and clicks Search, those characters will save as a new search term, provided this set of characters has not already been searched for. The term will save whether or not the search returns any results in the store.
From the Admin:
1. Click Add New Search.
2. In the Search Query field, enter the search term as you anticipate the customer will type it.
3. If you anticipate that a customer may incorrectly type a term in the search bar, but you still want this search to point to the correct results, you can enter the correct term in the Synonym For field. For example, when searching for electronics, if your customer accidentally types electroincs, the query will produce no results. If you designate that electroincs is a synonym for electronics, your customer will see the correct results.
4. If you prefer that a customer’s search does not produce a results page, but rather leads somewhere else, such as an existing catalog page, you can enter the desired web address in the Redirect URL field. This web address can be within the same store, or a completely different website altogether. For example, if you have two stores, one that sells digital wristwatches and one that sells analog wristwatches, you can designate that a search for digital in your analog wristwatch store redirects to the digital wristwatch store. This way, your customers won’t wind up with an empty results page.
Editing Search Terms
Once a search term has been saved, you have the ability to edit two new fields. Simply click on the desired search term in the list and you have access to:
• The Number of Results field displays how many results were displayed to the customer during the most recent search using the selected search term. This can be changed manually, but it will reset to the real number of results the next time this search term is used in the store. This is more useful when creating a new search term, or adding a synonym for an existing search term. For example, you noticed that several customers have searched for the plural shirts, but this has not produced the maximum results, since several of your products only contain the singular shirt. You know that shirt returns 32 results (including the singular and plural occurrences), so after you have added this to the Synonym For field, you add 32 to the Number of Results field. This way, the next time a customer types shirt into the search field, they will see an option for shirt and for shirts, both with 32 results.
Note: If the Number of Results for a search term is blank, the term will not display in the suggested search terms dropdown window.
• The Number of Uses field displays how many times a customer searched for this term. As mentioned above, the suggested search terms dropdown window displays up to ten terms. The top ten terms are determined by the highest Number of Uses, and they will sort from top to bottom based on this as well. Therefore, you can ensure that a certain suggested term will always display at the top of list by entering a high Number of Uses into this field.
• When you’re done, click Save Search, and you have successfully customized your search options.
Advanced Search In the footer of the front-end is a link to the Advanced Search page. As you will notice immediately, the Advanced Search contains separate fields for each attribute. For an attribute to appear in this page, you must navigate to Catalog > Attributes > Manage Attributes, locate the attribute, and select Yes from the Use in advanced search drop-down. The field of each attribute will vary depending on the Catalog Input Type for Store Owner in the attribute’s properties. Some attributes may have text fields, others may have drop-down menus, while still others may have multiple select menus, and so on. Therefore, unlike the Quick Search, the Advanced Search will only search the attributes for which search criteria has been entered by the customer (if your customer enters search criteria in the color field, but not in the size field, the Advanced Search will only search within the color attribute). Within a given
attribute, the query will locate occurrences of the characters similar to the manner in which the Quick Search works, however this is only for text fields. Drop-downs, multiple select menus, and other Input Types will search for an exact match, since the available search options are already presented to the customer. As a result of the multiple search fields, there are no Search Terms which save to admin.