Anybody use a 3rd party search engine for PC?

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   The company I am work for wants the search results to be fast and more relevant than what ships with Product Cart. Has anybody has used Google Commerce Search? If so, how hard was it to integrate into Product Cart? Did it improve your search relevancy and improve your conversion rate? 
Does anybody use any other custom search solution that they would recommend? 

Our customers do a lot of searches on our site, so at peak times it can be a bit slow even with searches that only bring up a few items. We do have our maximum search results rather high (750), and it isn't something the decision makers want to lower even though we've shown that it improves speed enormously. Internally our managers also complain about relevancy. That is something we can probably tune by editing the product information, it would also take a lot of work to figure out what needs to be improved and how to improve it.

Is there any suggestions people have to improve the search engine that comes with Product Cart?

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razor150 Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List Newbie Joined: 29-May-2008 Status: Offline Points: 7	Post Options Post Reply Quote razor150 Report Post Thanks(0) Quote Reply Topic: Anybody use a 3rd party search engine for PC? Posted: 31-July-2012 at 1:21pm
	The company I am work for wants the search results to be fast and more relevant than what ships with Product Cart. Has anybody has used Google Commerce Search? If so, how hard was it to integrate into Product Cart? Did it improve your search relevancy and improve your conversion rate? Does anybody use any other custom search solution that they would recommend? Our customers do a lot of searches on our site, so at peak times it can be a bit slow even with searches that only bring up a few items. We do have our maximum search results rather high (750), and it isn't something the decision makers want to lower even though we've shown that it improves speed enormously. Internally our managers also complain about relevancy. That is something we can probably tune by editing the product information, it would also take a lot of work to figure out what needs to be improved and how to improve it. Is there any suggestions people have to improve the search engine that comes with Product Cart?

Greg Dinger Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List Certified ProductCart Developers Joined: 23-September-2006 Location: United States Status: Offline Points: 238	Post Options Post Reply Quote Greg Dinger Report Post Thanks(0) Quote Reply Posted: 31-July-2012 at 3:25pm
	you may want to look into Nextopia. One of our accounts uses that successfully.

razor150 Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List Newbie Joined: 29-May-2008 Status: Offline Points: 7	Post Options Post Reply Quote razor150 Report Post Thanks(0) Quote Reply Posted: 31-July-2012 at 7:21pm
	Thanks Greg. Would you customer mind if you sent us a link to their site so we can see how they integrated it with Product Cart?

Greg Dinger Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List Certified ProductCart Developers Joined: 23-September-2006 Location: United States Status: Offline Points: 238	Post Options Post Reply Quote Greg Dinger Report Post Thanks(0) Quote Reply Posted: 31-July-2012 at 8:59pm
	email me at my site please.

geoff Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List Newbie Joined: 15-January-2006 Status: Offline Points: 2	Post Options Post Reply Quote geoff Report Post Thanks(0) Quote Reply Posted: 03-August-2012 at 8:58pm
	Some of these bought or licensed solutions are quite expensive. The fundamental problem is the fact that the search queries are not making use of an indexed search. Have your developer look at MS SQL 2008 which supports Full Text search - you can add your own thesaurus etc. - but the key thing is that it is indexed. It is pretty easy to customize the ASP for this. There are a few excellent books on this. We have some very large tables for 20,000+ product descriptions. Indexing them is the key.... Searches go from 20s to sub-second. The difference is unbelievable and is Google like in response on a reasonable server. Take it further and then add the autosuggestion add-in that is available for about $50. Hope this helps and that you report back how you improved on this. Good luck

geoff Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List Newbie Joined: 15-January-2006 Status: Offline Points: 2	Post Options Post Reply Quote geoff Report Post Thanks(0) Quote Reply Posted: 03-August-2012 at 9:02pm
	Oh - we did previously use Google custom search - but found the indexed MS SQL 2008 FTS was a much better result when wanting to better control the output of the search for product driven search results and retaining some of the nice internal features of PC. Some leading websites use a combination - see www.iherb.com for an impressive example (not pc) who handle the initial search internally then default to google.