The global configuration of the module can be found into the Catalog Search section of System > Configuration > Catalog.
First, you have access to the global configuration of the search engine shared with all other engines (MySQL and SolR) :
Then you have access to the ES search engine parameters. You can check here if the search engine is correctly set up (Search Engine param should be set to Smile Serchandizing Suite). Other parameters should be changed only by developers and are documented into the Installing the module.
In the end, you have access to ElasticSearch specific configuration parameters :
| Param Name | Description |
|---|---|
| Facets Max Size | Maximum number of values to display into a facets Note : This param applies only on term facet and is not used for prices, rating and categories facets. |
| Enable Search on Options Labels | By default Magento searches only on option ids for select attributes. This setting allows to use their textual value into fulltext. Since there is no uses case where the default behavior is expected this setting will be removed from a future version and it's value will be yes by default. |
| Enable ICU Folding Token Filter | ES plugin filter used to clean UTF-8 invalid characters. This feature comes at the expense of the performances and should be enabled only if your catalog contains bad UTF-8 characters. |
| Enable Fuzzy Search | Enable the approching search. Used to automatically fix user mistyping. This feature replaces the traditionnal "Did you mean" feature into the module |
| Fuzzy Prefix Length, Fuzzy Min Similarity, Fuzzy Prefix Length, Fuzzy Max Expansions | Fuzzy search fine tunning. This parameters can be used to fix the fuzzy search behavior if it match too many or not enough products. Full documentation for the params can be found into ElasticSearch official documentation : http://www.elasticsearch.org/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/query-dsl-flt-query.html |
| Fuzzy Query Boost | Relative weight of fuzzy search result. Exact matches have a weight of 1. The default value (0.3) will result approching result being 3 times less important than exact ones. |
What is fuzzy search ?
Approximate string matching (a.k.a. fuzzy search) is the technique of finding strings that match a pattern approximately (rather than exactly). The problem of approximate string matching is typically divided into two sub-problems: finding approximate substring matches inside a given string and finding dictionary strings that match the pattern approximately.
Into our engine it is used to fix :
- User mystipings (ex: frankenshten instead of frankenstein)
- Give reponse for other form of a same word (ex: playing instead of play)
It avoid the usage of a "Did you mean" feature by fixing the user query and consequently avoid an user click to refine it's query.
You can find a very complete documentation about possible implementation of fuzzy search into ES at this address : https://www.found.no/foundation/fuzzy-search/.
The implementation is subject to change into the future. Currently we are using two queries (one for exact match and one for fuzzy) and we combine their scores. An alternative will be evaluated as described into #7.
You can find all settings related to the configuration of an attribute into Catalog > Attributes > Manage Attributes
This section is very similar to what Magento EE propose for the SolR implementation :
The main settings related to the search engines are :
| Param Name | Description |
|---|---|
| Use in Quick Search | Indicates if the attributes has a role in search relevancy computation. |
| Search weight | Weight of the attributes into search relevancy. Typically we use higher score on product names than on it's description. |
| Use in advanced search | Advanced search is not implemented. This settings is useless. |
| Use in layer navigation | Should the attribute be used as a facet into categories navigation |
| Use in search result layer | Should the attribute be used as a facet into search result |
Notes :
- This extension allows text attributes to be used as a facet (Magento only allows facets on select / multiselect attributes. Do this only on attributes that are imported from a clean source of data to avoid list which contains many times the same values with different typos (ex: "Robert De Niro" and "robert de Niro" will be two different facets).
- The attributes Rating filter is a vurtual attributes which allow to configure the rating facets and sort. You can change it's label per store view, show / hide the facet, manage the facet position or show / hide the sort order.
The module is shipped with interface allowing to configure Virtual Categories (sometimes called Smart Categories). The Virtual categories is a powerful mechanism allowing the admin to select product of a category by building a search engine query instead of picking the products one by one.
Examples of Virtual Categories :
- All blue products that are in stock into the category men
- All product of type "Blazer"
- All product having the containing the word "Kit" dans leur nom.
To define a category as Virtual Category :
- Go into the Category tab of your category :
- Set the category virtual using the "Enable virtual category" switcher
- The manual product picket is now hidden and you can define the rule to match your product instead
- Save the category and navigate into you category on the front to verify everything is working as expected.
About anchor categories
By default, Magento uses a categorie attribute call Is Anchor with is responsible of attributing all products of all children category to the parent category if the Is Anchor. This attribute is also responsible of triggering facet display / hide.
The virtual categories hide this attribute into the admin and make the default value equals to Yes for the Is Anchor categories
The default module implementation make all facets being multi-select facets :
Some facets like the price or the ratings have default templates bundled with the module. Developers can define custom facet for every attributes (see Developper documentation for more information).
The module comes with an autocomplete which allows by default to autocomplete :
- Popular searches made by users of the website
- Products
- Categories
Default template is very simple (only name) but can be overridden by developers to display additional attributes (eg. image) like described into Developper documentation :
