There’s a good reason Celebros is the only Magento Premier Partner for site search and the only site search technology to be certified for both Magento 1 and Magento 2. Actually there are 6 reasons (see below), the foremost of which is the intuitive ability to understand what your customers are trying to say, versus what they’re actually typing into the search box.

Data is the driver behind every smart merchandising decision—after all, it’s a quantifiable representation of your customers, in terms of what they’re buying and spending. Leveraging sales data to power smarter transactions is a hallmark of a smart Magento ecommerce operator.

Typewriters gave way to computers. Floppy disks were replaced by flash drives. Polaroids were driven to extinction by the digital camera. As history has shown us, newer, better technologies are likely to always win out. What’s next in this progression of antiquated innovations? The answer is text-based site search.

Site search that’s still powered by keyword matching or plain text interpretation is soon to go the way of the dinosaur, in favor of semantic search and natural language processing (NLP). Why? Well, like all things now obsolete, it’s falling out of favor and unable to keep up with new demands from other technologies surrounding it.

In 2014, the world of computing as we know it changed. This was the year that mobile computing overtook desktop browsing, pushing smartphones and tablets into clear focus as the number one way people surfed the web. Today, this remains true and in fact, mobile browsing has blown desktop computing out of the water thanks in part to annual smartphone improvements and the rise of popular tablets like the iPad.

Words like “with,” “without” and “including” are simple enough to understand, but in the context of on-site search, they could have a critical impact on the results returned. They’re called qualifiers and if your ecommerce site isn’t equipped with a semantic search function like Celebros, it’s words like this that are going to cause you and your customers some major headaches.

Humans are flawed — we make mistakes. We forget to pick up milk on the way home from work or we accidentally lock our keys in the car when we’re in a hurry to pick up milk. And, try as we might to get through life with as few mistakes as possible, it’s in our nature to make them often.

No matter how many products your ecommerce site has, site search remains an integral function in helping to push conversions and solicit convenience to customers. But, depending on the depth of your inventory, your site search might prove to be an asset in different capacities. A site with 10 products is going to have different needs than a site that has 1000 products with dozens of variations each, for example.

The term “Advanced Machine Learning” site search sounds like something you might hear in a science fiction movie. Don’t let the fictitious-sounding name fool you, however: this technology is readily accessible to Magento ecommerce merchants and investing in it could just be the best decision you make for your store’s site search function!

e-Commerce managers know that there are a variety of tricks out there for drawing people deeper and deeper into their online stores. From splash pages and banners, to recommendation features and popups, it’s easy enough to grab people’s attention when they’re on your site and show them things they might like.

But what about when it comes to showing them what they need?