I'm trying to get search working on my Magento installation (200,000SKUs); we are wholesale so most products are just an SKU.
Of course with Magento you can type in part of the SKU and a bunch of results will come up that have absolutely nothing to do with what was typed in (?) seemingly regardless of how I have the search feature set up.
Does anyone have suggestions for an extension that won't break the bank or some form of changing settings; I've never had a search feature return such arbitrary results before.
I've researched improving it within Magento, but regardless of settings it always returns the same results. Plugins range in price from free (I tried a free one which did nothing) up to hundreds of dollars.
Thanks.
EDIT: To give you an example we have a product titled 14BL and even when searching for 14BL the obvious result (i.e. 14BL) will not show up even in the first page of results. What will show are a bunch of results that have nothing to do with the original search term (i.e. searching for 14BL the first 5 results are AD, 14SBNJ, BCAD, 18INLBJP, 14IND)
Also worth mentioning is that the website is focused on a large number of products for wholesale purposes (i.e. low traffic/private website with specialised search terms so paying large monthly fees for search is unfeasible).
Best Answer
I'm going to go against all my morals and recommend you take a look at this:
Better magento search - Lucene powered - $80
Have been using this for a year and a half & never looked back.
The pros:Extremely fast, accurate & simple to use. Excellent support staff & only a once off fee.
The cons: Code is obfuscated
I tried a bunch of other extensions prior to this in order to make search more accurate, but most of them had complex configurations, slowed down the search function & weren't as accurate.
You can give it a shot & if you don't like it they have a 7 day money back guarantee.