Product release

Elastic App Search Magento module beta release

We are pleased to announce that the very first beta of the Elastic App Search Magento module is now available.

Magento has a vibrant developer ecosystem. Since its release in 2008, it’s become one of the world’s foremost ecommerce platforms. And it keeps getting better: Magento offers a robust library of modules and themes — and it has a native implementation of Elasticsearch as its base search engine implementation.

With the release of this module, you can use Elastic App Search as the base Magento search engine. With it, you can ship leading search experiences more quickly and easily than ever before.

Embrace search relevance through the App Search dashboard 🔧

The App Search Magento module will allow you to add App Search to Magento in minutes. App Search is powered by Elasticsearch, but it offers refined APIs and focused, accessible dashboard tools to help improve search build times and ease the complexity of tuning and maintaining search experiences.

Learn more about App Search

Once installed, the module leverages Magento indexers to automatically ingest data into your App Search search engine. It will also automatically sync your Magento synonyms with your App Search engine, so you can manage everything in one access-controlled location.

App Search provides more than just synonyms: it unlocks deep relevance tuning and analytics features that make it easy to improve search results and increase your conversion rate. Once data has been ingested, any party, technical or otherwise, can use these powerful features to better merchandise search results.

For example, you can customize your result ranking though Curations, or set up Boosting rules on your attribute values:

Managing a curation in App Search

You can also leverage Search Analytics to gain deep insights into search behavior and drive informed decisions on what actions need to be taken to optimize search results:

Graph of queries by day in App Search

Managed, self-managed: Choose what’s best for your project ☁️

We know that each project has unique needs, and that choosing services leads to tough decisions. Choosing your search engine deployment method is one of them. Elastic App Search is available as both a managed service and a self-managed distribution. Depending on your hosting preferences, you can choose whichever best fits your ecommerce platform.

If you don't want to worry about maintaining and hosting your search engine, the managed service is the best way to leverage the full benefits of App Search. You can get started with a free 14-day trial.

If you wish to host App Search on your own infrastructure, you can download it and use it for free with the Elasticsearch Basic license.

We ❤️ Magento developers

We want you as a developer to have the best experience possible when using our module.

To achieve this, we’ve decided on the following core principles.

Be respectful to the Magento core logic

Installing the App Search module should not impact your current deployment.

To accomplish this, we've focused on implementing the following interfaces:

\Magento\Framework\Search\AdapterInterface 
\Magento\Framework\Indexer\SaveHandler\IndexerInterface

All of the behind-the-scenes logic fits into the base search adapter implementation. You can be confident that the module will not interfere with your layout. It won’t introduce any custom controllers or unexpected page layout logic.

Building this way has another key benefit: We can provide fast updates to the App Search module when changes happen in the Magento ecosystem.

Be frontend agnostic

App Search isn’t concerned whether you use the Magento legacy frontend design, or if you have embraced GraphQL and Progressive Web Applications. The module will deliver consistent search results across all consumer data: legacy front, REST API, or GraphQL resolvers.

We believe you shouldn't be forced to install middleware and duplicate heavy business logic.

Be developer friendly

Managing developer environments can be very tricky when using SaaS services. Sharing the same environment is not always possible because each developer applies different versions and methodologies.

Because we have both a managed and a self-managed option, your developers will not be forced to build on top of a shifting platform. Every development environment can embed a full, self-managed App Search distribution with a free Basic license — which is available at no cost.

Be extensible

Indexing your catalog and searching through it is great. But you will likely need to index and search within various content sources, not just those in your catalog: CMS pages, tutorials, and many others.

The App Search Magento module makes ingesting multiple sources easy. You’ll have all the basic building blocks you need to ingest and search through all of your content.

Join the beta 👷

The module is in its first round of beta. This first round is a technical preview that aims to validate our ability to integrate App Search as a Magento search adapter.

Check out the App Search Magento Module beta on GitHub

We’re excited to receive community feedback. The Magento community is vibrant and skilled, and we hope to work with all of you to deliver the best possible search experience using Magento Elastic App Search. If you’d like to contribute to the project, we welcome GitHub issues and pull requests.