Search Engine: FULLTEXT Search with Fuzzy Matching
Shared search engine with FULLTEXT indexing, LIKE fallback, fuzzy matching that catches typos, phrase search, and stop-word filtering in six languages.
Search that actually finds things
PrestaShop's built-in search leans on keyword matching against product names. Misspell a word, use a synonym, or search in a different word order, and results thin out fast.
Our Search Engine provides full-text search with FULLTEXT indexing, fuzzy matching that forgives typos, phrase search, word-variant expansion and stop-word filtering in six languages. Shared across the modules that need search.
How it works
- FULLTEXT indexing: creates MySQL FULLTEXT indexes for fast, relevance-ranked search across large catalogs
- LIKE fallback: falls back to LIKE-based search when no usable FULLTEXT index is available
- Fuzzy matching: finds results even when the search term is misspelled or approximate
- Phrase search: quoted phrases are matched as exact sequences
- Word variants: basic suffix and variant rules for English, Polish, German, French, Spanish and Italian
- Stop word filtering: ignores common words (the, and, is) per language to improve relevance
Entity search
The Search Engine is not limited to products. It has built-in search for categories, manufacturers, suppliers and CMS pages, returning the labels and metadata that fit each entity.
Used by 42 modules
The Entity Selector widget and the other participating modules search through this engine rather than each building their own.
The numbers
- 4,883 lines of runtime search engine code
- 42 modules sharing the same search infrastructure
- FULLTEXT + LIKE: FULLTEXT where an index exists, LIKE otherwise
- Multi-language: stemming and stop words per language
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