In current e-commerce scenario where online retail owners are competing to win front seats with racing speed, a slow page loading is considered as a silent killer and a snail’s pace of searching process is regarded as a disease which make your customers feel sick and tired of. Be an extra feature of Magento Community Edition but its default search function is not really highly evaluated. Almost users complain that this search tool is too slow and inefficient. Thus, the mission of online merchants is to upgrade this function in order to make the search process easier, faster and more precise.

The easiest way to meet the current needs is to install a searching module to replace the default search tool. Although there are many vendors who offer a variety of modules based on different technologies, but the most three open source search engines are Solr, Sphinx and Lucence.

Sphinx – The SQL Phrase Index is a free open source full-text search serve. As an independent search engine, it is fast and suitable for other applications. Sphinx was specially designed to be compatible with SQL databases. This Application programming interface is used in many languages like PHP, Python, Perl, Ruby, Java and MySQL storage engine. It is also very easy to utilize in a new language.

Solr – An open source platform provides a useful search function to those who want to build a search tool for their website or to make a specific search page to search music, film or to seek a job. The Solr uses the Lucene TM Search Library and extends it. Additionally, Solr’s major features include powerful full-text search, hit highlighting, faceted search, real-time indexing, dynamic clustering, database integration, rich document (e.g., Word, PDF) handling, and geospatial search.

Lucene – An Open source library with full text search support is developed by Dough Cutting and managed by the Apache Foundation Organization. This is a tool applied to create an index for the text used in the search engine. The Lucene helps process input documents for plain text to generate an index and supply search mode based on this index. A leading Lucene – based Magento module developed by WiseRobot’s programers is Lightning Search Extension. This module enables the searching process to work in a flash. Your customers can save their valuable time and therefore be motivated to purchase more. In order to get more knowledge about the full features and the functionality of each, please visit our Lightning Search Extension‘s page. The demo and user guide are also available for your checking out. Read more about the interview with Kevin Irish from one of our key clients Storables.com to know his experience with the module.