How to improve your search on Magento with Elasticsearch ?

How to improve your search on Magento with Elasticsearch?

You are looking to improve your search on Magento? Continue reading to find a quick overview of the Elasticsearch solution and what it will provide to your store.

What is Elasticsearch?

Elasticsearch can be described as a real-time distributed search and analytics engine that allows you to explore all types of data very quickly. It is used for textual, numerical, geospatial, structured, and unstructured data.

It is particularly known for its simple REST APIs, distributed nature, speed, and scalability allowing fast indexing of many types of content.

How it works

Elasticsearch packages up all functionalities into a standalone server that your application can talk to via a simple RESTful API, using a web client from your favorite programming language, or even from the command line.

We could describe how it works as below:

1. Search terms are sent to the website server
2. Research is made in the documents from the Elasticsearch server
3. Documents are found and sent back to the website server
4. Documents are displayed in the search results

What are the advantages and disadvantages of Elasticsearch?

Elasticsearch provides several benefits among which:

• a quick and advanced search
• support for multiple languages
• support for stop words and synonyms
• accurate, performant, and scalable

While it certainly shows real advantages, implementing an autocomplete with Elasticsearch has some limits as it requires some SQL and database knowledge and more generally, development skills and time.

How to considerably improve your search on Magento?

As of Magento 2.4, every Magento installation must be configured to use the Elasticsearch solution for the Catalog search. If this is your case, but you would like to improve the default features, you should take a look at our Elasticseach Suite.

The Elasticsearch Suite will help you to enrich your search on Magento with additional features.

Step 1: Install Elasticsearch

You can refer to the Magento documentation for details about installing Elasticsearch and initial configuration.

Step 2: Configure Magento to use Elasticsearch

The next step is to make sure Magento is configured to use the Elasticsearch server.

For that, you can go to:
Stores › Settings › Configuration › Catalog › Catalog › Catalog › Search

From the Search Engine list, select the Elasticsearch version you are using.

Step 3: Improve your autocomplete

Once Elasticsearch is installed and configured as the search engine in your Magento instance, you should be all good.

Unless you decide to go further and make your Magento autocomplete a little sexier!

You can use one of our extensions for that:

• Enhanced Autocomplete: to get an ultra-fast and user-friendly autocomplete and display relevant results on products, CMS pages, categories as well as search suggestions
• Multifaceted Autocomplete: to enhance the search results from Enhanced Autocomplete with a multi-faceted autocomplete including filterable attributes, products sorting, and many display options

Step 4: Improve your layered navigation

Don't leave now! You didn't take a look at our Advanced Layered Navigation module yet and it will certainly be a game-changer for you!

The module allows you to offer a completely optimized and responsive layered navigation to your customers.

It comes with several advantages:

• ultra-responsive on any device
• instant search results update
• highly configurable
• SEO-friendly
• entirely plug’n play

See also

How to start a dropshipping business with Magento

How to open a new sale channel with Google Shopping Actions

How to bring business to your store with Local inventory ads