How to Use the Joomla Smart Search Extension

February 11, 2012 | Joomla Tutorials | Written by Steve Burge

Joomla 2.5 shipped with many new features including multi-database support and much improved one-click upgrades.

One the most important of those features was a brand new search extension: Smart Search. Smart Search is destined to be the replacement for com_search which has been around since 2005 at least.

Smart Search is disabled by default but it's easy to enable and is a big improvement.

How to Enable Smart Search

Go to Extensions > Plug-in Manager and enable the Smart Search plugin.

Go to Components > Smart Search and click Index in the toolbar.

You'll see a progress bar as Joomla indexes your site. This is the first and last time you'll need to run this indexer.

When you're finished, you'll see all of the indexed content as in the image below:

Now that your content is in Smart Search, go to Extensions > Module Manager and place your Smart Search module live on your site.

The Smart Search module will look exactly the same as the normal Search module.

However, when you use the module, the Smart Search results will look very different:

There is also an Advanced Search feature to allow people to drill down more accurately:

Click on the Advanced Search and you'll be presented with the ability to filter your search by Author, Category, Country, Language, Region and Type.

Content Maps

Those settings we saw in the image above can be edited in the administrator area of the extension. Go to Components > Smart Search and click Content Maps.

Click on Type and you'll see your site content divided into Articles, Categories, Contacts, News feeds and Web links.

Click on Author, for example, and you'll information about each one. You can unpublish any of these if you don't want them included in the filters.

Search Filters

Smart Search also allows you to create pre-defined filters so you can provide your users with a specific set of results. Go to Components > Smart Search > Search Filters and click New.

You can create a filters with any or all of the Authors, Categories, Countries, Languages, Regions and Types that we saw before. You can also filter by date.

In order to allow people to use the filter, make a menu link. Go to Menus > Main Menu and click New.

Choose Smart Search > Search.

Your Filter settings are on the right-hand side.

Choose the filter that you wish to provide to your users and save the menu link. Users will now only be able to search within those results.

Configuring Smart Search

Inside Components > Smart Search > Options there are a lot of configuration settings available.

Click on Index and you can also change the weight given to different factors in the search results:

Smart Search looks wonderful, right? Why on earth would you not rush out and make it the default on your site? Two reasons:

1) Smart Search currently only support the Joomla core extensions, unlike the old Joomla Search component. That's why Smart Search is still turned off by default. Hopefully enough developers will make their extensions work with Smart Search that it will be come the default for Joomla 3.0 later this year.

2) It's not been heavily tested on large sites. It's a new feature and some bugs will inevitably emerge.

It won't be long however before Smart Search is ready for prime time and becomes the default Joomla search extension. It's a huge improvement. Give it a try!

Comments

#1 Tim Coldwell 2012-02-13 15:29

Just installed Joomla 2.51 for testing. I don't see any "Smart Search Module"

#2 Tim - @bfsurvey 2012-02-13 23:41

Quoting Tim Coldwell:

Just installed Joomla 2.51 for testing. I don't see any "Smart Search Module"

If you have just upgraded to 2.5 from 1.7, you may have to discover and install the new modules and plugins before you will see them.
extensions->extension manager->discover
press discover
select all
install

#3 Tim Coldwell 2012-02-14 09:46

Thanks. but ... "No extensions have been discovered." Mystery.

#4 K2Joom 2012-02-14 11:33

I just did my first 1.7 to 2.5.1 as per this guide and the module was listed without the need to discover.

Its listed as Smart Search Module.

#5 Tim Coldwell 2012-02-14 14:07

I found this under Warnings: The PHP temporary directory is the directory that PHP uses to store an uploaded file before Joomla! can access this file. Whilst the directory not being set isn't always a problem, if you are having issues with manifest files not being detected or uploaded files not being detected, setting this in your php.ini file might fix the issue.

Where do I find the php.ini file referred to here?

#6 freshwebservices 2012-02-14 14:48

Hi Tim,
The location of the php.ini file & whether you have permissions to edit it, are dependent upon your hosting environment. I'd refer this to your hosting company support.
That said, I have the same warning on my Joomla site & its nt stopped Smart Search module from installing.
Cheers,
Eddie

#7 Jon V 2012-02-15 03:11

Any idea on how to get the module to get the search results to display on it's own page without modules?

The standard Search module will let you set the ItemID to a menu which will allow a search result from the home page or any page to exclude other modules.

This is with the Smart Search:
www.cmbraintrust.com/en/

#8 SEBLOD - Bes 2012-02-29 19:51

Thank you for the article. You are right it s a very nice improvment, performance and result quality are very very great.
For information, SEBLOD CCK is already compatible with it, and Smart Search can indexed SEBLOD Fields. Some improvment in the next feature lile indexing during content submission.

Due to the process of Smart Search all extensions which insert some content in Joomla (article, category) by using Joomla content plugins are compatible with Smart Search.

Best Regards

#9 Naomi 2012-03-07 00:33

When I enable Smart Search and went to 'Components', there was no selection for Smart Search.

#10 K2Joom 2012-03-07 06:34

K2 v2.5.5 should be Smart Search compatible when it is released.

#11 Jiri Spousta 2012-03-12 08:56

I have the search module on the bottom of my page. How do you change the search suggestion option to show up instead of down? Have not find this anywhere, any hints? Thank you

#12 Gyanesh Sharma 2012-06-16 06:31

If you have the smart search on the front page, the search results show up in the bottom of all modules and it is difficult for the users to know if their search returned any results if the front page is loaded on the top with a lot of modules.

This could be easily fixed by the following hack:

Add the following lines on /modules/mod_fi nder/tmpl/defau lt.php at the bottom just before the form tag is closed:

#13 dignitola 2012-09-26 00:34

If you add this module before all of your site content is ready, why can't I run the indexer again when I have loaded all my content and my site is ready to go live?

#14 Manuel 2012-12-10 02:27

Hi, Thanks for this awesome article about smart search. Since smart search does not index MP3 files what would be your suggestion so that users in a comunity music site can search for mp3s ?

Thanks in advanced

manuel

#15 Dash r 2013-01-17 09:57

Hi there
whenever i search for a document on my site, the search result displays different categories in which the document can be found but not the actual document.

for eg, if i type in chocolate in my search box, the results must display all documents that have the filename as chocolate. it must not bring up categories.

is there a way to fix this?

#16 designlink 2013-03-09 07:13

Thanks for the thorough article, helped in both deciding whether to use it or another plugin, as well as setting it up. I used it successfully for a client that was having search difficulty and it looks like it's going to help out a lot, just upon first switching the results were already a lot better. I found a bug already, but it's an easy fix and I'll find the development and let them know.

Looks like a lot of options for smart search, and well thought out. The filter feature is a pretty neat addition, and I see the programmers really did some thinking about integration using typical Joomla integrations.

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