New search model beats Amazon

Rickey

Hello Everyone,
What do you run for shop search?

This claims 0.630 precision against 0.543 for Google Shopping, and 0.469 for Amazon, on a 90 query benchmark.
https://www.marktechpost.com/2026/08/02/onton-releases-ontology-1-a-neurosymbolic-search-model/

Mine returns nothing for a plural, or a one letter typo.

Andrew

Woo's own search simply searches against title & short description -- no attributes, long descriptions.

SKUs! This would certainly explain much of the empty searches you see...

Turkan.Turgut

We started to recieve emails from customers who couldn't find products that are in the shop!

Rather than try and optimise for search. I decided to just re-add the category menu into our header.

MellowThistle0520

Interesting! We log search terms and when searchs don't return results; that told us more than any plugin.

What was more important were the top 10 searches that returned nothing. And every single one of them was a word we had literally NEVER used on product titles.

People were typing in search terms that did not even exist on our site (at least, nowhere near enough to appear in the titles).

So it's not just the search box but that it's part of a larger content strategy to improve discoverability.

ivanvallejo

Understand.

So depending on your goals there's a trade-off.

If you want typo/typo-synonym capabilities there's a cost (you have to maintain an index).

If you go with a hosted search service then there's a monthly cost and you have to maintain your product feed (though this may not be so onerous depending on your setup).

In the end I feel like I've made the best call I could at the moment. I don't regret it at all - it's still a work in progress. There is things we can tweak or add to optimize it.

Thanks for sharing your experience.

ewoods

On a different thought: Would you happen to know, if you're using an index-based shop search plugin, if there are performance concerns for a shop with about 4000 products hosted on a shared server?

ivanvallejo

The heavy lifting is the initial indexing - that's done in the background.

Once that's out of the way it reduces the cost of subsequent searches (since they don't scan through all of your product meta data).

What you'll find is the initial index scan will take quite a long time - so if you schedule the first full index in the early hours of the day, that's going to happen while you're asleep 😉

vijaY.jOSePh

When running a search on the website, would the search words count as "tracking", meaning that a user would need to have been informed that search activity would be tracked (a line on the cookie banner etc).

I'm not sure what is considered as tracking these days and it's unclear whether search queries count as one of those things.

My point here is that if this were to be the case, that would effect the cookie banner and the consent forms to allow that sort of tracking to take place, assuming consent is required at all.

Also on the plus side, if the model works, you can use that to provide your customers with a lot of power and a seamless experience.

MellowThistle0520

Yes, we have the search log as a table on my website. Nothing fancy or complex or a analytics tool whatsoever.

Back to my point: we need to look into the words used on product titles first.

My best friend and I went through about 15,000 products, and the product titles in general are in decent condition. So that's a good start point.

You need to look at the words people type to find out where you need improvement on.

@vijaY.jOSePh I don't think it's about privacy here because my search logs were nowhere near that. But that's just me!

Rickey

I logged the searches for a week and found 60 out of the 400 search results had no result, half of them were the brands of products.

But the brands weren't written into the titles themselves, instead the brands were put in attributes of products. So we have since started putting the brand in the titles, which fixed those searches.

troygray88

As I had argued, most of these plugins are sold on peoples' fear - Anyway, it cut the how-do-I-find-this emails to almost nothing with two synonym rules.