This article is general for Shopify, BigCommerce, Wix, WooCommerce, Magento 1, Magento 2, and CS-Cart.
These settings are currently in beta and are being gradually rolled out. If you don’t see these settings in your admin panel, they haven’t been enabled for your store yet.
Searchanise now provides two new search settings that give you more control over how search queries are matched:
- Word matching – controls how individual words are matched.
- Phrase matching – controls how multiple-word queries are processed.
These settings help improve search relevance when customers expect exact matches rather than partial ones.
When should I use these settings?
These settings are useful if you notice that:
- search returns too many irrelevant products;
- you want more precise search results.
Example
Searching for Omen also returns products tagged with recomendações.
In this case, switching Word matching to Exact match prevents matches based on partial words.
Searching for Vitamin C returns products containing only Vitamin or only C.
In this case, switching Phrase matching to Exact phrase match ensures that only products containing both words are returned.
Word matching
Go to the Searchanise admin panel > Search & Navigation > Preferences section General tab > Word matching part.
Partial match (default)
Search matches parts of words.
Example
Search for:
shResults may include:
- Shirt
- Shoes
- Fishing
This option returns the broadest set of results.
Exact match
Search matches complete words only.
SKU substring search does not work when Word matching is set to Exact match.
Example
Search for:
shirtResults include:
- Shirt
Results do not include:
- T-shirted
- Shirtss
- Suitshirt
Choose this option if you want to prevent matches based on partial words.
Phrase matching
Go to the Searchanise admin panel > Search & Navigation > Preferences section General tab > Phrase matching part.
Search words separately (default)
Uses OR logic.
Products are returned if they contain at least one word from the search query.
Example
Search for:
Football bootsResults may include:
- Football equipment
- Winter boots
- Football boots
This option maximizes the number of search results.
Exact phrase match
Uses AND logic.
All words from the search query must be present in the product data.
The order of the words does not matter.
Example
Search for:
Football bootsResults include:
- Football boots for kids
- Men’s football boots
- Lightweight boots for football
Results do not include:
- Football equipment
- Running boots
- Football socks
Because all query words (football and boots) must be present, products containing only one of the words are excluded. The order of the words does not matter, so products containing boots for football are also returned.
Improved search relevance
Along with these new settings, Searchanise also improves how search results are ranked.
Products are now prioritized based on:
- Exact phrase matches;
- Words appearing in the same order as the search query;
- Products containing all search words;
- The distance between matched words;
- Matches at the beginning of searchable fields;
- BM25 relevance scoring.
This helps ensure the most relevant products appear at the top of the search results.
