X-Cart forums

[anandat]

Nikita,
Your CloudSearch module is becoming very powerful on each new release
The only thing hurt me is it's pricing policy. I fit to $349/yr category . My products price ranges between $1 to $5 & can't afford to pay $349 every year ..LIFE TIME .... to provide just search facility to my customers.

R u planning to release any download self hosted version ? As I seen download version for x-cart NEXT is already scheduled.

I am sure if you can make this module as one time pricing then you can get lots of customers.

[carpeperdiem]

Hi Nikita,

Fantastic!
In the top searches results, is there a way to display the number of hits a query receives?
Right now, it's just making a list. it would be useful to know the importance of a query.
Thanks for continually making this product better and better.

Best,
jeremy

[NikitaP]

Thanks guys for your feedback.

anandat, I sent you a PM, please check it.

Jeremy, thanks for the suggestion. I added hit counts to the top query list.

You are welcome to introduces a new ideas on how to make this feature better.

[anandat]

Nikita,
1) How cloud search behaves with utf-8 characters ? If customer put utf characters in search box then still he will get accurate results ?

2) What is the server specification ? Does this server only dedicated for cloud search module ? Also what is the policy for number of sites per server ? Right now in your demo site the results are coming at a lighting fast speed. Do you guarantee that even though number of cloud search users will increase there will not be any load on your server & search results display performance will not be affected ?

3) All my products images are hosted on my sites only but while uploading the thumbnails/images I always choose " File on the Internet (enter image URL)". Because of this in search results images will be take time to load ?

4)How script will be crawl my site to get new products ? Is it going to put load on my server for each day crawling ? If there is no new products added on my site then still it will crawl my all products or it will just crawl incremental way ?

5) Does it also consider product keywords mentioned in product admin also or just the product name & description ?

6) Any plan to put "Buy Now" button in result window ?

Looking forward for your reply.

[NikitaP]

Anand,

1) CloudSearch does support utf-8, actually there are stores running CloudSearch with slovenian, greek, french and other languages successfully.

2) At the moment there are plenty of server resources dedicated to support CloudSearch growth. We use server and application monitoring to control the performance. Whenever we spot performance degradation we add more server resources. Speed is one of the main features of CloudSearch and we are not going to give up on this.

3) As long as urls of the images are the same it doesn't matter how they were assigned.

4) It is a good question. When we designed CloudSearch we considered two approaches: to periodically re-index all the data or do it incrementally. We took the first approach because of simpler connector implementation. Incremental approach requires implementation of some (relatively) sophisticated logic on the connector's side to track changes to searchable entities, and it will put some additional load on the client's server. There would be some performance gain on our side but I can't say that incremental approach would be more effective for connector implementation (not to mention reliability). The load CloudSearch puts on X-Cart is very low because of simple SQL queries and little processing. There is always a dilemma: do something on one side of the system or on the other. The main approach we take is to do more on our side and less on X-Cart side. As long as I see this approach justifies itself.


5) CloudSearch considers product name, description, SKU, manufacturer, product options names, extra fields and category name for each product. Keywords are not considered. We are trying to use only the data that is shown to customers.

There are also static pages, manufacturers and categories - they can be searched too.

6) Not really, but this can surely be done by customizing CloudSearch connector code.


I highly encourage you to try free evaluation to see it all in action.

[ADDISON]

Originally Posted by NikitaP

Anand,

5) CloudSearch considers product name, description, SKU, manufacturer, product options names, extra fields and category name for each product. Keywords are not considered. We are trying to use only the data that is shown to customers.

Keywords are important in my opinion. If you could implement to use them in that moment you will allow a custom CloudSearch. I can add my own keywords just to refine more the search, I could adapt my searches to be more accuracy. I suggested this feature to TheXCartStore to improve their predictive module. Unfortunately they did not take in consideration my advice (no time). I think TXS Predictive Store is very powerful but how it presents the data in front-end is terrible.

[NikitaP]

Originally Posted by ADDISON

If you could implement to use them in that moment you will allow a custom CloudSearch. I can add my own keywords just to refine more the search, I could adapt my searches to be more accuracy.

I agree that this is reasonable. Thank you for the suggestion, I will definitely consider it in the next release.

[NikitaP]

Also could you describe some features of the TXS Predictive Search that you wanted to see in CloudSearch?

[carpeperdiem]

Originally Posted by ADDISON

Keywords are important in my opinion. If you could implement to use them in that moment you will allow a custom CloudSearch. I can add my own keywords just to refine more the search, I could adapt my searches to be more accuracy. I suggested this feature to TheXCartStore to improve their predictive module. Unfortunately they did not take in consideration my advice (no time). I think TXS Predictive Store is very powerful but how it presents the data in front-end is terrible.

Keywords are not important to google (anymore).
Descriptive text in the product description - "what does the customer see?" - is MOST important.

[ADDISON]

@carpeperdiem: we were not talking about Google's SEO. we talked new features related to CloudSearch. Read again to understand.