One Week With The AI Search Plugin On My Game Shop Site

atomicbiscuit78

I put the AI search plugin on the store site last Saturday, free plan, and I've been typing weird things into it all week to see what comes back. Classic theme, about 40 pages and something like 90 event posts from The Events Calendar, no products in it because we sell in store with Square.

The good bit first. I typed "puzzle for a 5 year old" and it found the kids' corner page. Our old search gave me nothing for that, because the page doesn't say "5 year old" anywhere, it says "ages 3 to 6" and "little ones". A customer did almost the exact same search on the tablet at the counter on Thursday and got the right page, so that's one real person it helped - not just me.

Now the not so good bit. "opening hours" still gives a blog post from 2019 first, the one where we changed the hours for a holiday week, and the actual contact page comes second. I'm pretty sure a normal person clicks the first result and gets hours that are 7 years wrong. I haven't found a way to tell it which page matters more, or I'm looking in the wrong place.

The floating button also sits in a weird spot. It's half over the header on desktop and on my phone it covers the menu icon. I pushed it down with a bit of CSS from a tutorial but I'm not thrilled about that.

Indexing took around 10 minutes for everything, which was fine.

I'd keep it for now. Game night people search for odd stuff like "the game with the camels" and it got that one too, which I did not expect.

Edit: 2019 post, not 2018, I checked.

evan

Read the readme before you judge the results. The AI search plugin only sends published text to their end, no visitor IP. No cookie and that matters more to me than whether it finds the camels - because I can read a search log but I can't take back a leaked IP. Still doubt it earns its keep on 40 pages.

mohamedvanhoof

Welcome. Same on my spice shop, old posts with the same words keep winning until you want to go and tidy them up.

wildanchor

I'm using the Optimi search plugin on a sim racing shop too - and what I like most is it surfaces old threads that never had the right words in the title.

mUhammaD

Only "Match my website" still needed CSS on our Divi site. Thanks!!

byteme

Hi,
"Nothing breaks" is a bit much. It's one more service outside your own site and the free plan has a cap on searches so the day it falls back to the normal search your customers just get the old results again and nobody tells you... Ask me how I know.

On a small shop I'd fix the product titles first. I have the shop since last year, 140 plants - and the moment I put the Latin name in the title the normal search found them. You could try that before you pay for anything.

Rickey

The "opening hours" thing is not really a search problem, its a content problem, and I say that because I built my own embeddings search for a dog training membership site last year and ran into the same wall from the other side.

The search part took me maybe two weekends. Chunk the lesson texts, store the vectors, compare, done, it might be the easiest part of the whole thing. What ate the following three months was what people typed. Somebody searches "puppy biting" and what they want is not the lesson page, they want the exact minute in a 40 minute video where the trainer shows the hand thing, and no search on earth gives you that unless you have transcripts with timestamps.

So I'd guess the Optimi search plugin has the same ceiling: it can only rank what's on the page. If the page is wrong, or the answer is inside a video, its wrong too. I ended up transcribing everything, which was its own mess.

Axel.Gaudin

People type the problem not the product, that's so true. Nobody searches "bodysuit 62" on my shop. They type "something warm for the night" and the normal search gives zero becuase no title says warm so IMO that's the only real argument for the Optimi search plugin on a small shop. I'm not sure it's worth a monthly fee for me yet.

atomicbiscuit78

Update after a week. I added a synonym in Optimi AI Search so "hours" opens the visit us page now, and the 2019 post is gone from the top.

The search log was the real find. "parking" and "pre-order" got searched a lot with nothing found, so I wrote a parking page and it should pick that up tonight. Rickey was right, it only ranks what's there.

Edit: the button was my theme's z-index, not the plugin.

evan

Yeah, the log is the one thing in there I'd pay for; searches that find nothing are pages you haven't written yet, not a ranking problem.

You don't need the AI part for that though. https://wordpress.org/plugins/relevanssi/ logs searches with zero hits too, I have it set to keep 30 days on the accounting site.

The synonym bit is nice, I'll give it that.

Still not sold on the rest. It might be worth it at 400 pages, not at 40.