Smart Search

The Smart Search from alteredCart is a true 'Hybrid' search that utilizes multiple search technologies in one easy to use search engine specially designed to work with the X-Cart shopping cart system.

Many customers might be leaving your site because they are misspelling a word, using a plural word form, searching for the wrong word, or even entering the query in an order which causes 0 results. The Smart Search was designed to overcome all of these common problems, and help guide your customers to the products they are looking for.

The Smart Search makes it easy for you customers to quickly find what they need by utilizing these search technologies:

• Spell Checking
• 'Did You Mean?'; feature (similar to Google ^TM)
• Relevant Result Order
• Boolean Searches
• Automatic Similar Search Suggestions
• Easy to use Advanced Search
• Index Based Searching
• Stop Words
• Automatic Extended Results using Query Expansion
• Custom Stemming algorithm to aid in both singular and plural forms of words
• Optimized for English, and works with all western character languages
• Multiple Search technologies combined for a ‘Hybrid’ search and flexible query requirements

Requirements

There is no need to install any extra PHP extensions, or reconfigure your MySQL server. The Smart Search is fully self contained, and works after an easy install on any server running MySQL and PHP.

There are minor requirements (which are common, and generally used on most servers). Your MySQL database must support MyISAM tables. The Smart Search can be used with most multi-byte character sets. The exceptions are:

• For Unicode, the utf8 character set can be used, but not the ucs2 character set.
• Ideographic languages (such as Chinese and Japanese) do not have word delimiters and the Smart Search parser cannot determine where words begin and end, and they are not compatible.

Click here to try a live demo [new window]