Advanced Search 1.3

A great module, installs fine. Support is good. However, this extension needs some improvement: it will fail to find items if the user was not careful using spaces. EG. if something is called "Brand Name", searching on "brandname" (oneword) will not find it. (Our previous webshop has no issue with it, nor our competitors' stores). Support said they plan to implement it in the future. Unfortunately any Magento Search Extensions i've tried so far failed this test. So i'll stick with it and wait for the next upgrade.

Anyone who has worked with magento for any amount of time can vouch that Magento is TERRIBLE for their search function. I just sat in a eCommerce user group, and the speaker showed the change of ecommerce shoppers from browsing categories to just performing a search. If your search doesn't bring back useful results, you most certainly will lose a sale.

Being based on sphinx I was able to use their guides and the help of aheadworks to configure exactly what I needed and now I return 8 results for a two word search rather than 2000.

We used the advanced search module at: http://www.forcom.be the search results are much better than with the standard Magento search function. We had to do some tweaking with the Aheadworks team to get the results our client wanted.

We have noticed very much relevance on results using this extension. I recommend you all.

We are using this extension on one of our client sites with 6k+ products and the search results have been a lot more relevant compared to the default Magento search.

We did have some initial problems with this extension because we use the flat category and product catalog setting. The couple of bugs we found were successfully fixed by the AW team and communication during the support process was fast and effective.

It would be nice to have some more information about how exactly this extension interacts with the Sphinx software as well as confirmation that the search extension can be used for multiple websites/stores running on the same Magento install - which it does, but we had to ask.

Also, not all Sphinx installations configure the Sphinx default port to the value specified in the installation instructions so you need someone who knows what they're doing on the server side to set the extension requirements up, otherwise it may not work straight away. However, with the correct awareness and by following the installation steps, this extension can be set up and running within half an hour. Of course, you may need to do some additional CSS to adapt the look and feel.

We like the fact that the extension is simple to configure and it handles singular vs. plural searches very well. Ie. you get similar results when you search for toaster or toasters. You can aslo set it to use boolean expressions to combine search keywords but your customers would need to be aware of the correct syntax.

The only thing it lacks is the "soundex" feature where it would suggest correct spelling but that's not supported by Sphinx itself. If you want more sophisticated options, you would need to look elsewhere (and spend more) but if you want to improve the native Magento search quickly and without much hassle, provided you can add Sphinx to your server, this is a well priced and quick solution.

@ Brian:

Of course, a Sphinx based search requires having a Sphinx server running...

Furthermore, Magento should always be hosted on a dedicated server.

We purchased this and realized afterwards that it requires having Sphinx installed onto your server. If you have a dedicated server then this is no problem, but if you are on a Shared Host, then you had better contact them first before purchasing because it looks like many Shared Hosts don't support Sphinx.

Will it also search through the knowledge base as well as products and blog? Now that would be GREAT!