E-commerce is the most engaging & trending business model. But with huge competition & advanced features to offer it is a game changing business approach. If you look to enhance conversion rate and boost revenue of your Magento store, then integrating search engine is a necessity. The core objective of a search engine is to showcase the most important results to visitors’ questions. If your website lacks accuracy to display quick and accurate search results, visitors will not stay on your site and find proper alternative. When we talk about the e-commerce search engines, the 2 most popularly used e-commerce search engines are Magento Sphinx Search Vs Magento ElasticSearch to meet e-commerce vendors business needs.
Working of Magento Search
Once a search engine is installed, it works by indexing website content. This process is constant but when an update is performed on the website, it needs to be refreshed. For instance, you want to integrate smartphones within your store. The search engine will index things comprising title, description, and price. Once a user shares its query, the search engine showcase results sorted through the list of items. Different search engines work in different manner and have features to interpret and filter data.
Introduction to Magento ElasticSearch
Elasticsearch is the most popular and the default feature for Magento search. It is Java-based, designed to store JSON documents and interact in a native manner. Thus, in addition to management of text-based queries, it can also comprehend latest analytical questions too, covering interpreting of numeric information. From customer’s viewpoint, it provides faster and more related search experiences. For vendors, this results into faster conversions.
Advantages of Elasticsearch
1. Higher Scalability
If you’re planning to grow products database, then you might face challenges while searching relevant items. But Elasticsearch can help to enhance search capabilities in line with products database. Numerous airline ticket and hotel aggregator applies Elasticsearch to provide results by verifying 1 TB data along with 300K events every second.
2. Data Visualization
Data visualization is the most engaging feature of e-commerce websites and it’s been properly implemented in Elasticsearch. The availability of Logstash, Kibana plugins, and Elasticsearch offers Magento Development Company a great tool for analytics. It supports not only real-time tracking of web traffic, but also manages record of important including number of unique visitors, total visitors, searched questions, and browser used. All this data is displayed in the dashboard with colorful tables, charts, and maps.
3. Real-time indexing
Elasticsearch has the flexibility to index changing data in real-time. Thus, if a Magento store requires updating the database regularly, Elasticsearch is a perfect option to consider. Uber, for example, applies Elasticsearch to gather business metrics as per the dynamic metrics including pricing and supply positioning. Consequently, Uber can manage over 1,000 questions per second at peak times.
Introduction to Magento Sphinx Search
Sphinx is an SQL-based search tool customizing search API for multiple scripting languages including PHP, Python, and Perl. It is an open-source search engine written in C++. It supports batch index and search data saved in database, or find data instantly. With different processing features available, Magento Developers apply Sphinx to satisfy different application needs. The search engine hosts multiple functions, making sure search quality is easy to tweak.
Advantages of Sphinx Search
1. Fast and Robust
From the last few years, Sphinx Search has transformed to a huge extent and attained the skills to offer real-time search. Its search speed has reached to 500+ queries per second scanning 1,000,000 documents. Craigslist, holds the capacity to cover 50 billion page views in a month and can serve over 300+ million users’ queries on a regular basis. In addition, Infegy also indexes approximately 20 billion Facebook, Twitter, and blog posts to share insightful social media monitoring and analytic queries.
2. Create ResultSet in Parallel
One key benefit of the Sphinx is that it supports Magento Developer to generate different results from the same information at the same time. In contrast, a conventional SQL technique offers a temporary table for each search result set. In the meantime, Sphinx applies a multi-query mechanism to perform this task. In other words, instead of applying one query after another, Sphinx makes use of multiple queries at once and submits them within a single request.
So, these benefits gives a clear understanding which is a better choice when making a selection between Magento Sphinx Search Vs Magento ElasticSearch for e-commerce store integration.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. How does Magento search work?
The standard Magento 2 search works in the following way: either manually or on a set schedule, the site re-indexes all the goods and adds information about the attributes involved in the search in the database.
2. What is Magento Elasticsearch?
Elasticsearch is an open source product that enables you to take data from any source, any format, and search and visualize it in real time. Elasticsearch performs quick and advanced searches on products in the product catalog.
3. What is Elasticsearch good for?
Elasticsearch is a highly scalable open-source full-text search and analytics engine. It allows you to store, search, and analyze big volumes of data quickly and in near real time. It is generally used as the underlying engine/technology that powers applications that have complex search features and requirements.
Wrapping Up:
If you come across sluggish response from e-commerce store to retrieve the search results, it basically requires integration of the robust search engine. The two Magento Search engine mentioned are quite different in their working and making a selection is complicated. You can hire Magento developers to ease your stress in running online selling business. We hope that this article somehow provided you some crucial details, helping to pick the right option for your e-commerce business.
