Mirasvit Advanced Sphinx Search Pro for Magento 2 and 1

In the following post, we describe one of the most adaptive Magento 2 search engines – Advanced Sphinx Search Pro by Mirasvit. Along with Search Spell-Correction and Search AutoComplete & Suggest Pro, the extension is a part of Sphinx Search Ultimate. Note that you can get all three tools with a significant discount.

Below, we shed light only on Mirasvit Advanced Sphinx Search Pro for Magento 2 and 1, describing its features, backend, and frontend.

Download / Buy Mirasvit Advanced Sphinx Search Pro Magento 2 Extension

Download / Buy Mirasvit Advanced Sphinx Search Pro Magento Extension

The first thing we’d like to draw your attention to is the performance of the extension. The Advanced Sphinx Search Pro module is not only a high-speed ecommerce search engine but also a highly efficient tool aimed at both the smallest online storefronts and the biggest ecommerce marketplaces. The extension handles 500+ queries per second against 1 million SKUs.

At the same time, it is smart enough to provide customers with relevant search results for words and phrases with dashes and other non-alphabetic symbols. As a Magento admin or owner, you get the ability to customize the order of products in search results, placing desired items higher in the results list. It is only necessary to utilize the attribute weight feature properly.

It is also necessary to mention that Advanced Sphinx Search Pro filters out stop words from search queries and understands synonyms – the built-in dictionary consists of 60370 English items out of the box. As we’ve already mentioned in the previous posts, the better shopping experience you provide, the more satisfied your customers are, and a convenient search is an essential part of the ecommerce user experience.

Main Features

• Incredibly relevant results based on the user-friendly search logic.
• The multi-search feature that provides several separate sections of search results based on products, categories, blog, or other content.
• Each content type has its separate settings.
• Clear interface and flexible options (both are described below).
• A custom hierarchy for attributes: the most important can be displayed at the top of search results.
• The most relevant results for both singular and plural forms.
• Support for the stemming function. Each keyword is reduced to its base form, so search results consist of items that contain the root form of the word.
• The wildcard search is also among the core features of the Mirasvit Advanced Sphinx Search Pro extension. If you are not familiar with this approach, here is a brief explanation: such search is based on a character pattern matching between the characters specified in a query and words in product/category titles that contain those character patterns.

Advantages of Advanced Sphinx Search Pro

• Highly relevant search results;
• Extremely fast performance and indexing speed;
• Multiple content types search;
• Searching by product categories and IDs;
• Long-tail search;
• Synonyms dictionary;
• Customizable search results order;
• Stop words support;
• Wildcard search.

Backend

The Mirasvit Advanced Sphinx Search Pro can be customized under System -> Search Management -> Search Indexes / Manage Synonyms / Manage Stopwords / Settings.

Let’s have a look at the Search Indexes page. The core element of this page is a grid that contains 6 columns (ID, Title, Type, Position, Status, and Action) that gather and describe all search indexes. In our case, they include product, category, CMS page, WordPress Blog, Knowledge Base, and attribute indexes. You can reindex, edit, or delete selected search indexes from the Action column, as well as create a new index by pressing the “Add New Index” button.

While adding a new search index, Advanced Sphinx Search Pro provides 2 tabs of configuration options: General Information and Searchable Attributes. In the first one, you create a title of the index, select its type, and set its position among other search results. Besides, you can enable/disable the index here.

As for Searchable Attributes, this page enables you to add attributes that will be utilized in the search algorithm. Moreover, in this tab, it is possible to specify the weight of each attribute.

There is one more section in the Searchable Attributes tab – Properties. The available options here vary depending on the selected type of index. In the case of the Products type, first, decide whether to include all parent categories and child products (from the bundle, grouped, and configurable products) in the search index. Next, enable/disable search by product ID and custom options. Here, you can also force moving out of stock products to the bottom of the search results list, include only those products that belong to at least one active category, and change the default sorting order of search results. 

All synonyms are also gathered in a grid that shows keywords included in each synonyms group and store views where they are used. You can delete selected synonyms in bulk. Filtering and sorting are available for the Term, Synonyms, and Store columns. In addition to more than 60k synonyms available with the Magento 2 Sphinx search module, you can add your own or modify the existing ones.

While adding a new synonym chain or editing an existing one, you have to deal with the following parameters: Term (the main keyword), Synonyms (related synonyms), and Store (a store view where the synonyms should be applied).

Besides, there is a separate grid with stop words. It consists of just 3 columns: Checkbox (tick items for applying mass actions), Stopword (stop words utilized in the search algorithm), and Store (appropriate store view). Filtering and sorting are available for the second and third columns. As for mass actions, the extension lets you delete stop words in bulk.

To add a new stop word, type it in an appropriate field and decide where to apply it (choose a store view).

As for the extension settings, they are divided into 3 sections: Search Engine Configuration, Search Settings, and Multi-Store Search Results.

In Search Engine Configuration, there is the Search Engine option that lets you choose one of the following options: MySQL, Built-In Sphinx Engine, or External Sphinx Engine. For the external engine, you have to specify a host, port, and bin path. Besides, there are two buttons below: Check Status (quickly check if everything works correctly) and Restart Sphinx Daemon.

In Search Settings, you enable/disable Wildcard search, redirect from 404 to search results, redirect if Single Result, Google Sitelinks Search, search terms highlighting, and Related Search Terms. Besides, you specify the maximum number of items per search result.

Next, there are Wildcard Exceptions, a list of words to be replaced in the search query, “Not” words, and Long Tail Expressions.

As for the Enable Multi-Store Search Results section, it lets you enable/disable this feature.

Frontend

Below is an example of the search results for “swiatshirt”. You get two tabs: one with products, and another one with categories. In the case of products, the search term is highlighted.

The same is about categories.

Example of the search results for the “store” query:

Final Words

Mirasvit Advanced Sphinx Search Pro for Magento 2 and 1 provides an excellent shopping experience. The extension completely revamps the default Magento search, making it more precise and faster. As a result, your store visitors have better chances to find what they are looking for, and the ecommerce website gets a bump in sales. The extension costs just $149, which is quite a reasonable price for such a remarkable improvement.

Download / Buy Mirasvit Advanced Sphinx Search Pro Magento 2 Extension

Download / Buy Mirasvit Advanced Sphinx Search Pro Magento Extension