Magento Search Extension – improve your magento product search results

FAQ can be also found here

Known problems

Make sure to disable MAGENTO COMPILER and CACHE before installation

Make sure your magento installation has

• no edits or modifications to magento core (app/code/core folder)
• no conflicting modules (or conflicting custom code extending magento search) installed

Transfer file you downloaded from this website (BlastLuceneSearch-xxxx.tgz) to root of your magento installation

Navigate to root of you magento folder (where you see index.php and folders such as app, downloader etc) and run

sudo chmod +x pear

./pear mage-setup

This will enable you execure pear installer commands

then execute installer

./pear install BlastLuceneSearch-xxxx.tgz

For magento 1.6.x do:

sudo chmod +x mage

./mage mage-setup

This will enable you execure pear installer commands
then execute installer

./mage install-file BlastLuceneSearch-xxxx.tgz

you should see message that it is installed successfully

Installation – via FTP

Known problems

Make sure your magento installation has

• no edits or modifications to magento core (app/code/core folder)
• no conflicting modules (or conflicting custom code extending magento search) installed

Uncompress file downloaded from this website (BlastLuceneSearch-xxxx.tgz) and transfer files to correct places of your magento installation

To do that you can use any software f.e. 7-zip

Ok now copying part (use any FTP software you like)

package.xml - ignore file

modules/Php4u_BlastLuceneSearch.xml - copy file to app/etc/modules/

adminhtml - copy whole folder to app/design/

Php4u - folder with all subfolders - copy to app/code/community/

So final structure should be:

Installation via Magento Connect Manager (for magento 1.5.x and above)

Testing if that works

Now login to your magento admin url (ussually yourdomain.com/admin) and navigate to System > Cache Management and refresh all cache

If everything went ok you should be able to go to System > Index Management and see at the bottom new Button to Reindex “Blast Lucene Search” Index.

After installation please do add license to your module otherwise it will not work

How to add license?

or for version 1.4 and above

Press it and wait couple minutes (depends on number of products / stores in your catalogue), for big number or products we do recommend to reindex via SSH as it can timeout in the browser

After rebuilding Lucene index you can try to search on your shop frontend and enjoy blast speed

 

If you magento installation has logs enabled you should see in var/log/blastlucenesearch.log simple information how extension performs

 

There is admin section for that module as well:

 

(v1.5.4.4 – released 3rd May 2012)

• Search by product tags is supported, tags are indexed by magento
• CLI tool to perform operations (which can help magmi integration)
• Configurable list of ignored words
• Result can be build on exact, fuzzy and wildcard queries (joined result mode)
• You can set specific product to be on TOP or BOTTOM of the search results (when limiter not used)
• Configurable Product attributes booster (weighting)
• Singular/Plurar ENGLISH stemmer (so your customer will find what they want)
• API access via SOAP or XMLRPC
• cron job for scheduled indexing at night
• shell tool to clear search cache and more…
• possibility to index only new/updated products – that will save time and enable to resume indexing if fails
• no JAVA Lucene installation needed (you don’t need to install additional software on your server)
• all major web servers supported (Apache, Litespeed, Nginx)
• tested with big number of SKUs (1.7 Million)
• easy configuration options
• lucene results below (0.01s) – yes – that quick
• easy to install (via pear or ftp) – look below – SELF DIAGNOSING PAGE
• easy to maintain (rebuild index and you’re ready to go)
• phrase of fulltext search mode
• log file to track any problems
• zero code experience required (only installation skills which is super easy)
• buy with confidence – 3 days money back if you experience extension problems and we can’t make it work for you (need proof – for example live site, log files, index folder, frontend links, admin/ssh access)
• works with 1.3.xx,1.4.xx, 1.5.xx, 1.6.xx and Enterprise
• tested with PHP 5.3.2 (Magento 1.4.1)
• If no results are found – wildcard query or fuzzy search is used to find more results
• products are indexed on the fly, so you don’t need to rebuild index everytime you do changes
• magento synonyms friendly, word level synonims support
• you can select which characters should be treated as spaces (for example hyphens or slashes)
• search results are cleared whenever you save settings, so you see results straight away
• view log file from admin screen (no SSH access needed)
• only normal search supported – no ADVANCED SEARCH form

1.5.4.4
– experimental lucene-tool.php initial indexer fixed for 1.4.0.1
– fixed dataflow profile export for lucene position attribute

1.5.4.3
– experimental new reindexer via commandline
– config option to disable magento search caching
– improved hypens handling for indexing and searching

1.5.4.2
– index creation for IIS7 fixed

1.5.4.1
– utf8 for french characters fixed

1.5.4.0
– added log info when results from cache

1.5.3.1
– fixed notice with index on PHP 5.3.x

1.5.3.0
– added feature to run index optimisation every “n” document indexed. This will help to reduce number of files created in index folder.

1.5.2.1
– fixed disabling third pass (when second is disabled)

1.5.2.0
– added searching by tags supported

1.5.1.0
– fixed product positioner on some installations

1.5.0.0
– added word synonims support
– if products were removed from db, still results are delivered
– words remover fixed

1.4.9.3
– product id logged when indexing
– log can be switched off
– maximum number of words used from magento settings

1.4.9.2
– cli tool improvements
– cli tool preparation for integration with magmi plugin

1.4.9.1
– if query is shorter than 3 characters, lucene still will search
– stemmer fix for shorter than 3 characters terms

1.4.9
– added fix for EE and 1.4.1.1 where indexer mode was ignored

1.4.8
– added shell script to clear index and run other commands (1.5.x only)

1.4.7
– added list of words to remove from query

1.4.6
– added way of appending results of WILDCARD and FUZZY searches

1.4.5
– english stemmer improved

1.4.4
– self-diagnozing page – moved under System (from top navigation to save space)

1.4.3
– added option to move product to be on BOTTOM or TOP of the search results list

1.4.2
– self-diagnozing page – removed store 0 from indexes list
– cleaned code to not produce any E_NOTICE notices

1.4.1
– changed wording on self-diagnozing page about number of products in index and products processed

1.4.0
– product attributes weighting (booster)

1.3.0
– added licensing per domain
– fixed limiter for other than main attempt
– added additional step where you can define which charaters to remove from the query string

1.2.5 – minor release
– added config for non-standard utf8 characters

1.2.4 – minor release
– added info on diagnozing page about mb_string
– fixed number of products requiring reindexing on diagnozing page

1.2.3
– added full support for non-standard utf-8 characters such as Hebrew language

1.2.2
-index autofix added when products remove non-magento way
-too short queries moved back to original magento
-API – fixed images, configurable prices and sorting

1.2.1
– added image and prices so API results

1.2.0
– API access to search results

1.1.5
– fixed removing products for magento 1.4.1.1

1.1.4
– fixed indexer for magento 1.4.1.1

1.1.3
– fixed prefixed tables

1.1.2
- added memory usage log for queries
– added configuration option to limit results (and use less memory)

1.1.1
- fixed problem with indexers on 1.4.1.0 and 1.4.1.1
– added more information to self-diagnozing page
-added checks if module was installed correctly (EAV)

1.1.0
– cron job for scheduled indexing at night
– possibility to index only new/updated products – that will save time and enable to resume indexing if fails
– improved index handling – separate for 1.3 and above
– improved logs – more info about indexing

1.0.18
– added option to search for the thirds time if no results

1.0.17
– fixed problem on some php version with index rebuild
– removed exception if index out-of-date – moved to log

1.0.16
– added log browsing to Self-diagnosing page

1.0.15
– fixed utf8 encoding and index for 1.5.xx

1.0.13
– cleared search cache if settings chaged
– added option to convert hypens into spaces

1.0.12
– added more configuration settings for noresults behaviour

1.0.11
-speedup index building
-added conf to configure fulltext mode

1.0.10
-rebuilt search if no results
-more clever fulltext search

1.0.9
-fixed problem with search synonims

1.0.8
– added fuzzy search if no results
– added switch to not search if no results

1.0.7
– added Configuration screens
– added search mode
– fixed problem with multistores index
– added more log information
– added self-debug screen for troubleshooting

1.0.6
– added wildcard search if no results

1.0.5
– fixed index location problem
– fixed problem with tokenized fields

1.1.4
– fixed indexer for magento 1.4.1.1

• Same as magento requirements
• mb_string php extenstion
• pcre unicode support enabled

You can check you system requirements by running below:

<?php
if (@preg_match('/\pL/u', 'a') != 1) {
$html .= 'Error: Utf8Num analyzer needs PCRE unicode support to be enabled.';
} else {
$html .= 'OK: PCRE unicode detected.';
}

if (!function_exists(‘mb_strtolower’)) {
$html .= ‘Error: Utf8Num analyzer needs mb_string extension.’;
} else {
$html .= ‘OK: mb_string detected.’;
}

echo “$html\n”;