New addon "Quick search" is available for testing

We are glad to introduce a new addon for CS-Cart. It is called “Quick search”. As you can guess, this addon will help your customers to search for necessary products. When a customer types some text into the search field, he/she will see the pop-up menu (like the one in Google) with the products. One click and you will see the result on the screen.



Download link:

[url]http://alexions.dev.cs-cart.com/download/quick_search_1.7.tgz[/url]



Install this addon and open the settings page.



First of all, you should generate the search catalog. This catalog will include the product name, descriptions, search words, etc.



Number of search phrases

The default value is 0.

When a customer types something like this “I like this store”, this phrase will be saved and if someone starts typing “I li…” the whole phrase will be shown in the pop-up menu.



Number of products in search result:

This parameter is responsible for the number of products in the list.



Minimal phrase length:

The minimum length. If the phrase length is equal to or more than the value, the search will begin.



Cache the found search results:

All the search results will be cached. It means that next time the result will be returned quicker.



Open the customer area. When the page is loaded, type the word (not half of the word. The “adid” will not be found, but “adidas” will return you the results)



Please test this addon and let me know the results, whether or not we should improve something or correct any bugs.



If you like it, we will include this addon in the next release.



Thank you. I will look forward to your feedback.

Do you have a demo site?

Really interesting Addon, i’m trying it in local for the moment and seems to work correctly. I think i will use it on my live store and post my feedback.

Please download it with Firefox. IE messes things up as CS compress files with .\ inside.

This module has potential but I have a couple issues, as Noman mentioned, the results are distorted in IE8 and when i search for a product title it does not bring back proper results in the quick search. How can you make the search send back just product titles?



thx

Sorry CS, but I have already uninstalled it and went back with AutoSuggest by Shipping Kit. It didnt work for me. I had to type the entrie product code of 8 characters to find the product.

The CS-Cart search seems marginally faster but I prefer the way the AutoSuggest returns results on partial words. I also like the fact that you can control which fields are searched with the AutoSuggest addon.



Bob

Has anyone seen:

[url]http://bassistance.de/jquery-plugins/jquery-plugin-autocomplete/[/url]



That’s an awesome plugin and ought to be incorporated in any type feature such as this. That is if it works with jquery 1.2.7…

[quote name=‘phazei’]Has anyone seen:

[url]http://bassistance.de/jquery-plugins/jquery-plugin-autocomplete/[/url]



That’s an awesome plugin and ought to be incorporated in any type feature such as this. That is if it works with jquery 1.2.7…[/QUOTE]

Says it works with 1.2.6+ so it should be okay.



Bob

I am not having any luck getting this working. My test site is Windows XP running WAMP with Apache 2.2.11, PHP 5.2.9, MySql 5.1.36.



Installed the addon, went to settings and built the search cache. Opened my test site which has only one category and 3 products (Product One Test, Product Two Test, Product Three Test). Typed in "Product " in the search bar and nothing happened. Put some search terms in the SEO/Search terms section, rebuilt the search, same results.



This is a great addon and definitely needs to be part of CS core. When Google first put in Ajax search I thought it was brilliant. It is a huge time saver and makes the sites that use it look “professional”. IMHO, the search should work exactly like Google and Amazon. Full and Partial terms should be supported, if I type in “Pro” in my site, the search should return:



Product One Test

Product Two Test

Product Three Test



With the “Pro” bolded like Amazon does it. And it needs to be as fast as Google and Amazon bring back results from their millions of possible searches. I like the AutoSuggest concept, but it’s too slow. I tried to speed it up, but the “fading” effect doesn’t work for me. I am not skilled enough to know how to change that.



When suggestions are brought back, we should be able to use the down arrow to scroll to the suggestion we want and then hit return. Or use the mouse to click on the suggestion we want. Just like Amazon (hate to keep saying that, but there is a reason why they make billions).



Thanks,

Chris

Not working at all, is the addon even pulling the product name? I typed the full product name in the search field and it couldn’t even find it, displayed no results. I disabled and installed the AutoSuggest Addon from shipping kit and it works perfect. I’d like to see this addon in the default package, but seriously look at what shippingkit did, it works way better and their not even the developers of the cart - Sno

[quote name=‘snorocket’]Not working at all, is the addon even pulling the product name? I typed the full product name in the search field and it couldn’t even find it, displayed no results. I disabled and installed the AutoSuggest Addon from shipping kit and it works perfect. I’d like to see this addon in the default package, but seriously look at what shippingkit did, it works way better and their not even the developers of the cart - Sno[/QUOTE]

Sno-



It works for me - it seems to be pulling from both product name and product description. Did you create the search catalog in the add-on settings?



I still prefer the AutoSuggest because of the partial word searches but the CS-Cart search does seem a bit faster.



Bob

Yea I generated the catalog, maybe it’s because I’m testing on localhost but that shouldn’t be a problem as the autosuggest addon works on localhost no problem - Sno

Thank you for your feedback.

Let me tell you the differences between the CS addon and AutoSuggest.

I will not discuss the appearance. Only the “inner core”.



The “AutoSuggest” addon uses the default CS-Cart search engine. It’s not bad but it is not suitable for the “Quick” search. The default CS search engine uses the “LIKE” SQL operator, it means that if you input only one symbol, like ‘A’, all the products with the “A” symbol (in names, descriptions, etc) will be selected. Yes, the customer got the result, but (if you have, for example 2000, or 5000 products) it will take a lot of time (2,5 or 10 seconds). This is acceptable for the default search, but not for the “quick” one.



Also, the “LIKE” search will not return you the most suitable products for the search phrase.

For example:

You have these products:

  1. Helicopter (electric engine), plastic body, sport
  2. Helicopter (combustion engine), plastic body, professional
  3. Helicopter (combustion engine), metal body, sport




  4. And now, if a customer wants to find a sport helicopter with the metal body, he/she types as follows: “helicopter sport metal". Of course, the AutoSuggest will return the result, but this product can be displayed somewhere at the end of the list. The CS quick search will display this product at the top of the list, because it contains much more matches with the search phrase (you can try doing it yourself).



    Also, in the CS quick search addon, all the found results will be cached. So, next time a customer will receive the list in 0.01 sec instead of the full search time (2 sec).



    If you want, I can make the following change:

    Use the relevant search (as it works now), but if the result is empty, use the default search. So, when you type “abc”, the result will contain the products that have the “abs” phrase in their names, descriptions, etc.



    Looking forward for the feedback.

    Thank you!

[quote name=‘alexions’]The “AutoSuggest” addon uses the default CS-Cart search engine. It’s not bad but it is not suitable for the “Quick” search. The default CS search engine uses the “LIKE” SQL operator, it means that if you input only one symbol, like ‘A’, all the products with the “A” symbol (in names, descriptions, etc) will be selected. Yes, the customer got the result, but (if you have, for example 2000, or 5000 products) it will take a lot of time (2,5 or 10 seconds). This is acceptable for the default search, but not for the “quick” one.[/QUOTE]

Would it be possible to set/require a minimum length before the query is submitted? This seems like it would be a reasonable compromise to address what I see as the only real shortcoming to your addon - allowing partial results and maintaining relevance ranking.



Bob

[quote name=‘jobosales’]Would it be possible to set/require a minimum length before the query is submitted? This seems like it would be a reasonable compromise to address what I see as the only real shortcoming to your addon - allowing partial results and maintaining relevance ranking.



Bob[/quote]



I can understand the issue, I currently have 2k products and can estimate that searching via the backend takes just as long (10-15 seconds at time) however may I suggest that the “quick search” built a cache much like generating a catalog with references to the product. This would minimise the overhead upon first search.

[quote name=‘JesseLeeStringer’]I can understand the issue, I currently have 2k products and can estimate that searching via the backend takes just as long (10-15 seconds at time) however may I suggest that the “quick search” built a cache much like generating a catalog with references to the product. This would minimise the overhead upon first search.[/QUOTE]

The ‘Quick search’ does build a cache - it is generated in the addon options (much like the price list) and found results are later added to the cache. The last item may be one reason that partial searches would not work.



I like the speed of the ‘Quick Search’ but I do like the partial-word matches of "AutoSuggest’.



Bob

alexions-



Would it be possible to do the partial-word matches using the IN BOOLEAN MODE option of MATCH AGAINST or would that be too slow?



Bob

Am I get error 404 when i click the link below this text

“In order to generate a full search phrases catalog, open this link:”







John

Thank you for the comments. I considered them and made the following changes:



The partial search

For example, you have products (demo store):

  1. Adidas camp tee
  2. Adidas ClimsCool




  3. and you want to search for products by the “Adidas” keyword. So, you type “Adid” and receive the result.

    The search functionality works in two steps:
  4. Relative search.
  5. If no results are found, the search will be performed by LIKE coincidence (despite the fact that the LIKE operator is used, the search will still be much faster than the default one and AutoSuggest. This is the reason why we generated a search catalog before).



    P.S. I forgot to mention that if you select some catalog near the search field, the search for the necessary product will be performed for this catalog only.