Smartstore plugin MegaSearch has received a major technical improvement that speeds up the filtering of products by commodity groups. This update affects all users of the plugin.
The standard search for store items in Smartstore often reaches its limits for online stores with a large selection of products and extensive assortments. For this reason, there is the MegaSearch extension. Herewith the MegaSearch and MegaSearchPlus plugin replace the simple search and offer a working, fast and intelligent acceleration and more sales.
The search technology "Lucene" is the basis for MegaSearch and offers a variety of options for a full text search. These include automatic typo correction, text analysis, synonyms and weighting of search hits. Relevant suggestions are displayed as soon as the search term is entered. Even with a high number of records, MegaSearch delivers fast and accurate results.
The MegaSearchPlus plugin extends MegaSearch's functionality with localized and language-dependent data, MultiStore and access restrictions, and product and specification attributes.
https://smartstore.com/de/plug-in-smartstore-megasearch-finden-statt-suchen-/
Optimization for massively nested product groups
The new speed increase is most noticeable in merchandise group navigation in the store frontend, especially if the store has many merchandise groups and the "Include products from subcategories" setting is enabled.
A practical example of this is a store with technical industrial articles that has an astonishing 40,000 product groups, some of which are deeply nested. Thanks to the improvement, the product group navigation in this store is now much faster.
From a technical point of view, filtering is no longer based on product group IDs, but on the "category tree path". This is a filterable string that contains all the IDs of the category path.
IMPORTANT: With the next store update (probably to Smartstore version 5.0.5), the search index in MegaSearch must be re-created once so that the category tree path is included in the index.
Without reindexing, category filtering will not work correctly.
Reindexing can be triggered manually in the MegaSearch configuration. To do this, store administrators go to the backend and select "Plugins > MegaSearch". In the table they will find information about the catalog index. On the right side, there is a menu with the command to manually "Reindex" (rebuild index).
With this technical improvement, MegaSearch offers an efficient solution to quickly filter products by merchandise groups. Benefit from an improved search experience in your Smartstore store!