Magento search not returning expected results

Question

Our site, www.wearport.com (sorry - I'm not trying to post this for links stuffing/ad'ing! It's necessary for this question), uses search for users to find products in our catalog. We use the search widget in the admin to gauge how successful users are with searching for products. "Missed searches" are revised with synonyms and redirects as they are identified.

The issue is that many of the nominal searches don't work correctly. By "nominal" I mean terms that are prominent in the product - title, description, etc. If you search "fleece" it brings up sweatshirts and fleece, but the fleece is item 9 instead of

I know that more sophisticated indexing will be available in later releases, but I would think that this should work correctly OOTB.

Do I need to do further configuration of code and/or database?

Answer 1

Have you tried clearing your cache? Best practice is to always clear all cache and rebuild all indexes if you're having indexing issues with newly added products.

Answer 2

Magento Search, by default, is pretty terrible.

Two things that help.

1) In the backend, you can choose 'fulltext' or 'like' as search types. I've found 'like' to return much more relevant results than 'fulltext'.

2) This one's great: by default, all sorts in magento return results in ascending order. Searchs are returned by relevance. So you get them - that's right - in order from least to most relevant.

In your template, in the /catalogsearch/form.mini.phtml file, Within the

         <form id="search_mini_form" ... >

tag, add the following.

         <input type="hidden" name="order" value="relevance"> 
         <input type="hidden" name="dir" value="desc">

You'll see a marked improvement.

Answer 3

Thank Laizer, this's been most useful.

By the way, path in admin to change relavance is :System/Configuration/CATALOG/Catalog/Catalog Search/

But it's still not ok. I have a test product called product. If I search for plural "products" it doesn't find anything. Strange...

Cheers