If you want to increase conversions and boost revenue in your Magento based eCommerce store, then integrating an effective search engine is a must.
What is an effective search engine?
The main goal of a search engine is to fetch the most relevant search results to visitors’ queries.
In fact, if your store doesn’t return quick and accurate search results, visitors will definitely leave your store and go to your competitors.
In other words, if you want visitors to stick to your store and make a purchase, your eCommerce store must have the following search functionalities:
- Full-text search
- Autocomplete suggestions
- Spell corrections
- Highlighting
- Faceted search
- Search by synonyms
- Geospatial search
In addition to all these features, it is also extremely important for an eCommerce site to have real-time updates functionality since product prices and stock availability keeps changing.
Apart from this, your eCommerce site must also be able to provide relevant product recommendations to improve user experience and boost sales.
Identifying the Ideal eCommerce Search Engine
When it comes to eCommerce search engines, there are tons of options available to choose from.
But, we have already done the research and discovered the 2 most popular eCommerce search engines in the market – Sphinx Search & Elastic Search.
Both search engines are widely used and well-supported by their individual community.
Plus, both Sphinx Search and Elastic Search have almost equal performance, flexibility, and scalability, making it difficult to choose the right one.
So, how does one decide which is the right search engine for his or her eCommerce site?
For this, we will have to look at the pros and cons of each.
Let’s start with the Sphinx Search.
Sphinx Search Overview
Though Sphinx is currently ranking at 5th position among the top eCommerce search engines, it’s still a popular and powerful search engine and is currently being used by many famous systems such as Wikimapia.org, Joomla.org, Tumblr.com, CouchSurfing.org, and many others.
It’s basically an open-source, full-text search server that is designed in a way to provide high performance, search quality, and simplicity.
Sphinx Seach engine allows either batching index and search data stored in SQL database, NoSQL storage, and simple files – or index and search data on-the-go.
Let’s look at some of the pros that Sphinx Search offers to determine if it’s right for your eCommerce store.
Pros of Sphinx Search
Below, we’ve listed some of the important pros of sphinx search so you can understand why it could be the right choice for you.
1 – Fast and Powerful
Since the past few years, the Sphinx Search Engine has evolved a lot, and today, it has achieved the ability to provide a near real-time search.
In addition, its search speed has grown to 500+ queries/second against 1,000,000 documents with the biggest registered number of indexing at 25+ billion documents.
Thanks to this, Craigslist, which has over 50 billion page views per month, is being able to serve over 300 million users’ queries per day.
And not just Craigslist, but Infegy is also able to index over 22 billion Facebook, Twitter, and assorted blog posts in order to provide insightful social media monitoring as well as analytic queries.
2 – Produces ResultSet in Parallel
One of Sphinx Search Engine’s commendable benefits is that it lets you produce different results from the same data simultaneously by using a fixed amount of memory.
On the contrary, a traditional SQL method usually either creates a temporary table for each search result set or it runs two queries.
Sphinx, on the other hand, uses a multi-query mechanism to execute this task. In simple words, instead of executing one query after another, Sphinx makes a batch of multiple queries at once and submits them in a single request.
3 – Nothing Useless
If you’re just looking for basic search features and don’t need any additional functionalities such as search analysis or data visualization, then you should rather choose Sphinx.
As discussed earlier, it’s both fast and powerful for querying and indexing a vast volume of documents by using very limited computing resources unlike Elastic Search.
Cons of Sphinx Search
No eCommerce search engine is perfect. But, in Sphinx’s case, there is only one weakness.
It is not ideal for eCommerce sites that deal with unstructured data such as MP3s, Docs, or PDFs. This is mainly because Sphinx consumes a lot of developers’ time to configure, which ultimately makes Sphinx less comfortable to use compared to its Elastic Search.
Elastic Search Overview
Elastic Search engine has been one of the leading eCommerce search engines and it’s because Elastic Search has truly proved itself to be “elastic”.
In other words, Elastic Search Engine is widely popular and adopted because it can work in any environment.
In fact, it is already being used by many globally popular companies like FourSquare, Shopify, Mozilla, eBay, Netflix, Yelp, TripAdvisor, and many more.
Reason? Well, there are many! And below we will look at the pros of using Elastic Search to find out why.
Pros of Elastic Search
Elastic Search is based on open-source technology and uses the Apache Lucene library. This gives Elastic Search numerous advantages such as:
1 – High Scalability
If you’re planning to grow your products database, then you’re highly likely to face difficulties while looking up and fetching relevant products.
But, the Elastic Search can help to scale up your search capabilities in parallel with your products database so the search relevancy and speed aren’t slowed down.
For instance, Expedia, one of the leading airline ticket and hotel aggregators, uses Elastic Search to provide seeking through for around 1 TB a day along with 300K events per second.
In fact, using Elastic Search they have managed to drastically increase their customers’ booking experience satisfaction.
2 – Near Real-Time Indexing
Elastic Search is capable of indexing rapidly changing data in near real-time (less than 1 second).
So, if your eCommerce store requires updating the database constantly, Elastic Search is definitely an ideal choice for you.
Uber, for instance, uses Elastic Search to aggregate its business metrics based on dynamic metrics such as supply positioning and pricing. And as a result, Uber is able to handle over 1,000 user queries every second at peak times, all thanks to Elastic Search.
3 – Data Visualization
Data Visualization is one of the most trendy and in-demand features in eCommerce stores and it’s been perfectly implemented in the Elastic Search.
The combination of Kibana plugins, Logstash, and Elastic Search forms a great tool for analytics. It not only allows real-time monitoring of web traffic, but also tracks important metrics such as total visitors, number of unique visitors, most searched queries, device and browser used, and IP addresses.
All these data are visualized in the dashboard with colorful charts, tables, and maps.
In fact, thanks to Elastic Search data visualization feature, The Guardian is equipped with a powerful analytics system, which processes over 40 million documents each day to understand how their content is being consumed by visitors.
Netflix also uses Elastic Search for real-time analytics to keep track of events such as UI activities, performance, video viewing activities, error logs, and more.
4 – Security Analytics
Elastic Search also comes with a great security analytics tool. Its visualization and near real-time analytics lets you discover all sorts of security threats such as broken links, attack locations, problems with your web server, and attempts for unauthorized access.
In fact, Dell migrated to Elastic Search some time back and since then, their security has drastically improved, while their number of servers have been reduced by 25-30%.
5 – Amazon ElasticSearch Service
Elastic Search also offers an Amazon ElasticSearch service, which basically allows easy and quick setup and operates and scales the Elastic Search directly in the cloud without needing to configure your own servers.
Cons of Elastic Search
Although, right now the Elastic Search is ranked at #1 position among all eCommerce search engines, but it is still a relatively young technology.
In other words, it misses a couple of features like “Did you mean?”, but it could most certainly be added through a third-party Elastic Search Magento 2 Extension.
Final Verdict:
If you feel that your store has started to take a while for retrieving the search results, it basically calls for integrating a more powerful search engine.
And while the differences between Sphinx and Elastic Search aren’t many, but you should most certainly do a thorough analysis of your specific needs before making choose one.
We hope that this post has helped you understand the pros and cons of both Sphinx and Elastic Search and you’re now equipped with complete knowledge to make the right choice for your eCommerce store.
