CatalogSearch - add weight to different attributes

Question

I have my fulltext catalogsearch working fine for now, but I still see some not-so-relevant results. Before telling me that Magento's built-in search is terrible I'll tell you that I know there are free extensions out there etc etc, but I don't want to cripple my site with any more extensions.

What's happening is that the "relevance" (which is the score) only gets to 2.0 (from 0), and thus I have say 10 products with the same 2.0 relevance, while I should only have about 3.

My question is : is there a way in which I could tell Magento to add a better score for say name than sku(programmatically or not)?
A bit like Prestashop handles it (see picture below)

Thanks for your insight.

Answer 1

If you're willing to convert to Lucene Search which is actually built into the Zend framework that Magento partially uses and only needs a module to activate, you can have relevance and weighting.

By adding a supplemental search attribute, you can even have variants, nicknames and jargon without polluting your product description.

One such module is Blast Lucene and the weighting and ability to select a range of attributes to add to the pool made this non-free module pay for itself in about two months as customers could actually find stuff.

The short answer is "there's no free way you can improve Magento search". I wasted a lot of time, got complaints from both customers and management till I got out of that mindset. Fulltext might allow for the relevance to work, but it's not as competent as Lucene.

It's pretty embarrassing that Magento didn't use Lucene in the first place...

Answer 2

Short answer - no, there is no build in options, but there are modules at the magento connect that add it.

What they do is create own full_text index, with the score calculated as attributes with weights.

Also there are Solr integrations.

If you want to edit the query, you can start from app\code\core\Mage\CatalogSearch\Model\Resource\Fulltext.php, method prepareResult