As Magento stores grow, the inventory increases significantly. In addition, the number of categories and product pages goes up. Here is when a strictly defined website structure pays good dividends. However, a good structure doesn’t resolve the issue entirely. Users still face issues when searching for their intended products. The problem becomes serious as the number of products in the inventory increases and the users have to wade through a lot of similar looking products to find what they need.

This problem could be simply solved by installing a search Extension at the Magento store. To help the store owners, I have compiled the following list of top Magento search extensions.

AJAX Scroll

Supported Platform: Magento 1 Community Edition

Price: $59

AJAX Scroll by Amasty adds several important navigation and UI elements that are missing from the default Magento 1 interface. This extension adds great value to Magento stores by streamlining the user experience for the visitors.

With the ability to display the store inventory in an intuitive manner, it allows store owners to present the full complement of related products without worrying about pagination and similar issues, resulting in a measurable increase in the store’s conversion rate. In addition, the extension simplifies the placement of navigation elements on all pages. It also loads the previous and the next pages automatically, adding to the UX of the store.

Advanced Search

Supported Platform: Magento 1 Community Edition and Enterprise Edition

Price: $1,189

Advanced Search by Aheadworks enhances the default search capabilities of Magento stores. This extension is of particular benefit to those stores and websites that have a huge inventory and data items. Advanced Search extension uses Sphinx ( a popular open-source full-text search server) as the core search engine. Note that Sphinx is a prerequisite for using this extension. The users could use wildcard search (search using partial terms) and the extension is smart enough to correct the spelling of common search terms.

Easy Filter

Supported Platform: Magento 1 Community Edition

Price: FREE

Easy Filter by Synamen Thinklabs solves one of the most annoying UI problem of Magento stores. Stores with a large selection of product attributes often have to display the entire set. This disturbs the UI of the store and also affects the user experience of the visitors.

The extension simplifies the display of product attributes and presents it in a  neat UI format to the visitors. This is accomplished by displaying just five attributes while all other attributes appear in a searchable list. This also reduces the page length and allows the users to search product attributes easily.

Quick Search

Supported Platform: Magento 1 Community Edition

Price: $49

Quick Search extension by Extension Hut adds a much-needed capability of ‘autocomplete search’ to Magento stores’ search feature. Often times, the visitors have little idea of what they really need. This extension adds autocomplete to the search feature. In addition, it ensures accurate search results and caters to partial search terms. The result is enhanced user interaction that translates into more sales and better sales.

The extension is not limited to product catalog only. The extension covers the entire store including the category pages and other CMS elements. All this search capability is implemented without affecting the default search functions.

Ajax Search Autocomplete

Supported Platform: Magento 1 Community Edition

Price: $39

Ajax Search Autocomplete extension by Templates Master adds autocomplete feature to Magento store. Through it, the visitors could enter a partial term in the search box and start getting results almost immediately.

The extension could be customized to execute search queries by various store level features including description, shape, price, and status. This way, the customers are able to widen the search scope and narrow down their search to the exact item.

Further, it allows complete customization of the search box by altering the background color and default text. Developers can easily customize the extension to fit the design of the store.

Klevu Search

Supported Platform: Magento 1 Community Edition

Price: FREE (needs $199 Klevu subscription)

Klevu Search by Klevu Oy is an AI-powered extension that claims to convert every search into a sales opportunity for the store using NLP and multilingual support. The end result is a great shopping experience for the visitors.

Since the extension is powered by AI, it actually learns from experience. As the number of searches grows on the store, the extension gets smarter and presents better and more refined results to the visitors. This feature is demonstrated by the “mistake tolerance” of the extension that presents relevant results despite the mistakes in spellings.

InstantSearch +

Supported Platform: Magento v.1 Community Edition, Magento 1 Community Edition

Price: FREE for stores with less than 250 products/searches

InstantSearch+ by Fast Simon Inc. adds great value to Magento stores by understanding the intent behind the search. By using NLP algorithms, the extension is able to provide relevant results to the visitors. The users could enter a long search term and the extension will find all the products that match their intent.  In many cases, this translates into sales as the visitors do not have to leave the store.

Other features of the extension include rich text autocomplete, responsive SERP and analytics for search data.

Algolia Instant Search

Supported Platform: Magento 1 Community Edition, Magento 1 Community Edition

Price: FREE (needs a $49 Algolia account)

Algolia Instant Search by Algolia is an essential addition to any Magento store. The extension often produces results in under 10ms and greatly enhances the UX of the store and increases the chances of landing a sale.

Magento stores benefit from the extension’s many features that include autocompleting, responsive SERP and typo tolerance. In addition, it brings in synonymous searches that greatly expand its scope of use. Further, it uses advanced analytics options to ensure that store owners have extensive insights into the search patterns on the store. The API of the extension supports both JSON and REST architecture.

Search Suite

Supported Platform: Magento 1 Community Edition, Magento 1 Community Edition

Price: $298

Search Suite by MageWorx is a popular Magento store extension that ensures that the search capabilities of the store excel to accommodate a wide range of user requirements. Once activated on the store, the visitors could search the product line up using product attributes, SKU, and other related queries.

The advanced search capabilities of the extension come from the fact that the Search Suite utilizes three industry standard search engines, xSearch, Solr, and Sphinx. Users could enter partial strings, the first few letters of the product name or product codes to search the store.

Google Custom Search

Supported Platform: Magento 1 Community Edition

Price: $35.99

Google Custom Search by Commerce Extensions improves Magento stores’ search capabilities with a twist. This extension also improves the SEO rankings of the store by improving the way in which the users search the store. Smooth user experience is an important factor that Google uses to rank Magento stores.

The extension employs Google focused algorithms to optimize storewide search. In addition, given the semantic-based search capabilities, the users are able to discover their intended product just by using partial strings. In many cases, the extension also presents related products (based on the partial strings) as well to help increase the overall sales numbers.

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