Searching is an everyday task that we all perform throughout the day while surfing the internet. And whenever we type a search keyword or search phrase into the search bar, we’re presented with a set of results.
Generally, these search results are sorted by relevance – starting with the most relevant item on the top of the result set, followed by the less relevant result, and so on.
And this search approach has proven to ensure the shortest possible time and minimal effort in searching for what we are looking for.
Now, the software that produces the final result sets is called Search Engine.
And after the web search platforms such as Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc., eCommerce websites are where users perform the search the most.
Therefore, having an advanced search engine that returns the most relevant items is fundamental for eCommerce websites, especially when you want to improve your conversion rate.
In fact, research has also proven that consumers who perform searches on eCommerce sites are 200% more likely to convert.
And this is where Elasticsearch comes into play.
It comes with lots of useful features such as search suggestions, faceted navigation, autocompletes in search fields, etc that make the search functionality on any Magento store phenomenon.
Let’s dive in, starting with what is Elasticsearch, and understand how Elasticsearch can help to make the product search faster on your Magento eCommerce store.
What is Elasticsearch?
Elasticsearch is an open-source, highly-scalable search and analytics engine founded in 2010.
Based on the Apache Lucene, Elasticsearch is one of the most popular and currently, it is the default option for Magento search.
It basically allows you to search, store, and analyze huge volumes of data in near real-time.
It can be used for use cases such as full-text search, document search, product search, email search, etc.
And in this post, we’ll explain everything you need to know, from how does Elasticsearch works to what are its key benefits for Magento stores.
How Does Elasticsearch Work?
Elasticsearch is a scalable search solution with near real-time search and support for multi-tenancy, which allows you to search for all kinds of data.
It basically retrieves and manages semi-structured and document-oriented data.
In simple words, Elasticsearch takes in the unstructured data from various sources, locations, and stores and indexes them according to user-specified mapping to make it easily and quickly searchable.
5 Incredible Benefits of Elasticsearch
Now that you finally know the basics of Elasticsearch, it’s time we check out the ways it can benefit your Magento store.
- Full-text Search
Traditional SQL database management systems are not designed for full-text searches.
And since eCommerce stores often consist of large volumes of data, performing full-text searches using the traditional search engine is impossible.
Elasticsearch, on the other hand, is built on top of Apache Lucene, which makes it possible to implement a powerful full-text search functionality into any Magento-based eCommerce store.
- Fuzzy Searching
In addition to the full-text search, Elasticsearch also comes with the fuzzy search functionality, which is very useful for spelling errors.
In simple words, it allows searchers to find anything that they’re looking for even though they’ve made spelling mistakes in their search keywords.
- Autocompletion
The autocompletion feature is very popular on Google. It’s about when you start typing your search keyword into the Google search bar and it immediately provides you with suggestions.
For example, if you type Elasticsearch in Google search bar, it will instantly suggest you different search keywords such as elastic search benefits, elastic search AWS, elastic search tutorial, etc.
And with Elasticsearch, you can implement the same auto-completion functionality into your own Magento store.
- Speed
Elasticsearch is capable of executing complex search queries at a lightning-fast speed. It basically catches all the structured search queries as a filter for sending back the result set and executes them all at once.
And for every other search request, it first checks the results from the cache, which ultimately saves a lot of time required for parsing and executing the query, resulting in an increased speed.
- Scalability
Part of the reason why Elasticsearch is globally popular is because of its scalability. In fact, many popular brands such as Facebook, Netflix, Tesco, LinkedIn, Salesforce, Groupon, New York Times, Dell, and others have adopted Elasticsearch due to the same reason.
Now, Elasticsearch achieves high scalability because it is a distributed system and because of that it can easily scale with the ability to balance the loading between nodes in a cluster while extending its resources.
And it’s for these reasons, implementing Easticsearch in Magento-powered eCommerce stores is highly recommended.
As a Magento store owner, you have multiple options to integrate Elasticsearch into your store:
- Purchase Magento Enterprise Edition
- Hire Magento developers to manually create a connector between your store and the Elasticsearch
- Use a third-party extension that will instantly connect your store with the Elasticsearch
Of all these options, using the extension is the most preferred option among Magento store owners worldwide.
This is mainly because purchasing a third-party ElasticSearch® extension for Magento 2 is extremely cost-effective compared with the other two options.
And most importantly, integrating and configuring the ElasticSearch® extension is also the easiest way to connect your store with the Elasticsearch search engine.
So, if you own a Magento-powered eCommerce store, Installing the third-party ElasticSearch® Magento 2 extension makes perfect sense.
Wrapping Up…
Elasticsearch has already become the go-to-resource for integrating a highly-powerful and advanced search engine into eCommerce stores.
The majority of eCommerce startups as well as enterprise-grade companies are already making the switch in order to make product search experience faster and more user-friendly.
And if you’re also looking for ways to improve user experience as well as conversion rate on your Magento store, install the ElasticSearch® Magento 2 extension into your store right away!
