Amasty Sphinx Search Magento 2 Extension

Convenient browsing and instant search results are crucial elements of the user experience on an ecommerce store that have a significant impact on customer purchase decisions. Usually, online shops offer thousands of products, from which a website visitor needs to find a particular one. If you don’t want to lose potential clients, you should think about implementing neat navigation on your web store with advanced search functions to help visitors quickly find the desired goods.

Today, we present you a tool that is built to equip ecommerce sites with improved search functionality – the Magento 2 Sphinx Search extension by Amasty. The module provides integration with Sphinx, one of the most powerful search engines, which significantly expands the default Magento 2 possibilities. Besides highly accurate search results, the Amasty solution increases search speed and boosts website performance. This way, by installing the extension, store owners improve the average order value and conversion rates.

In this post, we explore the functionality of the Sphinx search server and describe the benefits of installing Amasty Sphinx Search for Magento 2 on an ecommerce site.

Download / Buy Amasty Sphinx Search Magento 2 Extension

Sphinx Search Engine: Overview

Sphinx is one of the most robust and popular open source search servers that provides advanced searching and indexing functionality to client applications. The search engine’s indexing speed reaches 10-15 MB/sec per CPU core, i.e., over 60 MB/sec per server, while its search performance for a 1,000,000 document from a 1.2 GB collection showed the result of over 500 queries/sec. In addition to high indexing and searching performance, Sphinx can offer great search relevance, simple integration, and scalability. Its scalability potential is proved by the server’s largest clusters indexing more than 20 billion documents and handling hundreds of millions of search queries per day. The Sphinx engine is widely used by some of the biggest Internet companies, like Craigslist, Groupon, Meta Cafe, and Living Social, to name a few.

Below, you can view the list of the Sphinx core features:

• NRT (near real-time) and batch indexing. The engine supports both offline batch and incremental real-time indexes.
• Advanced full-text search. Sphinx can process complex search queries, including boolean matching operators and optimizations, text matching operators (field restrictions, phrase, sentence, and paragraph matching, and more), keyword modifiers, and substring and wildcard searches.
• Non-text attributes search. The search server supports non-text parameters, like scalars, data sets, strings, and JSON, that can be used for extended search results processing.
• Rich database-like queries. Besides keyword-based queries, it is also possible to perform a search with arithmetic expressions that include WHERE conditions, ORDER BY, GROUP BY, and MIN/MAX/AVG/SUM parameters, and others.
• Indexing and searching through an SQL database. Sphinx can index data directly in SQL databases due to the native support of all MySQL connectors, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, SQLite, and other systems with ODBC.
• Indexing of data in non-SQL storage. Sphinx can index data from XML documents in the XMLpipe format.
• API integration. With Sphinx, it is possible to access the server via three different APIs: SphinxQL (a primary API client that uses standard MySQL library), SphinxAPI (a native API for PHP, Python, Java, Ruby, Perl, C, and some other languages), and SphinxSE (a special engine for MySQL and MariaDB).
• Flexible relevance ranking. Besides standard ranking based on BM25, Sphinx analyzes additional ranking factors.
• Text processing toolset. Sphinx offers advanced text indexing functionality, including support for almost all languages (SBCS and UTF-8 encodings), removal of stop words and hitless words, morphology and word forms processing, and more.
• Distributed search results. The engine allows distributing search results across multiple servers.

Magento 2 Sphinx Search by Amasty: Features

Sphinx Search for Magento 2 by Amasty provides seamless integration of ecommerce sites with the Sphinx engine and allows Magento 2 merchants to adjust its settings according to specific business requirements. By integrating Magento with Sphinx, store owners get advanced possibilities that guarantee a frictionless search experience for frontend users.

Below is the list of the functions offered by the Amasty Sphinx Search extension:

• Lightning-fast searching and indexing speed;
• High relevancy of search results;
• Advanced keywords matching;
• Multilingual support;
• Ability to eliminate stop words from indexing;
• Auto-correction of spelling mistakes;
• Support for synonyms;
• Possibility to use non-alphabetic symbols in search queries;
• Search autocomplete functionality;
• Customizable order of search results;
• Searching across various content types;
• Flexible management options.

Since the Amasty module leverages Sphinx search functionality, it provides fast processing of search inquiries and increases in website general performance and indexing speed. The extension can handle hundreds of requests in less than 1 second, providing online shoppers with instant search results. The Magento 2 module ensures stable work when processing search requests on databases of any size. Besides, the engine accelerates search performance by caching repeated requests.

The search mechanism behind Sphinx is based on user-friendly logic, which ensures exceptional search relevance. Due to the support for multiple languages, website visitors can get accurate search results in their native language. The Magento 2 search module filters out stop words and excludes them from indexing, as well as automatically corrects typos. The possibility to correct spelling mistakes drastically increases the chances that your store visitors will find an exact item they are looking for and make a purchase. Besides, the Amasty extension allows using synonyms for specific words to help customers easily find the desired products no matter how they type their names in the search box. The advanced functionality of the Sphinx engine ensures relevant results for searches where special characters and non-alphabetic symbols are used, as well.

Another useful feature offered by the Sphinx Search extension is related to product autosuggestions. With this function, you can significantly improve the user experience on your storefront and save the time your website visitors spend on looking for the necessary items. By utilizing the search autocomplete window, you help your customers quickly find the goods they are interested in by showing relevant product options based on the searched word or phrase. Moreover, you can set a custom order of search results in the window drop-down and move particular products to the top of the suggestions list. It is also possible to sort search results by product name, price, relevance, or custom options.

It is also necessary to mention that the Magento 2 module performs a search across multiple content types to ensure the best relevancy of results. Thus, the engine scans all related information in products, categories, CMS pages, blog articles, and other website content.

As a store admin, you get flexible management tools of search query results and extended customization possibilities. With Sphinx Search for Magento 2, you get access to the improved configuration of the search logic, decide which content should be searchable, can define characters limit for indexing, set the delay time, and more.

Final Words

Amasty Sphinx Search for Magento 2 is an excellent solution for improving overall search functionality on an online store and providing customers with more relevant search results. Based on the integration with the Sphinx search server, the extension revamps the default searching experience on Magento 2 by making it faster and more accurate. Thus, by ensuring a convenient searching process on the frontend and returning precise search results, you can significantly increase conversion rates and boost sales on your web store.

Sphinx Search for Magento 2 will be released soon, so follow the link below not to miss the latest news!

Download / Buy Amasty Sphinx Search Magento 2 Extension