Smart Search

Smart Search is a new feature in Joomla 2.5.

It adds a "smarter" search engine to the Joomla core which is more flexible and faster with auto-completion and the "did you mean" feature (stemming).

Stemming?

A stemmer for English, for example, should identify the string "cats" (and possibly "catlike", "catty" etc.) as based on the root "cat", and "stemmer", "stemming", "stemmed" as based on "stem". A stemming algorithm reduces the words "fishing", "fished", "fish", and "fisher" to the root word, "fish" (Wikipedia).

The Joomla core package comes with an English stemmer and the so called Snowball Stemmer (Extensions-> Smart Search -> Options). The English stemmer works out of the box, the Snowball stemmer requires the Stem PHP extension and provides support for 14 languages including Danish, German, English, Spanish, Finnish, French, Hungarian, Italian, Norwegian, Dutch, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, and Turkish. 

The data need to be indexed in order to get this flexibility and speed.

Activation

Smart Search is disabled by default. To enable it you have to enable the Content Plug-In Smart Search and the five finder-Plug-Ins. The name finder comes from the roots of this component. It was a 3rd party component which was integrated into Joomla! core (Figure 1).

Figure 1: Finder-Plug-in

Indexing

The content needs to be indexed in order to get the Smart Search to work. This is done automatically while saving content. The initial indexing can be done in Components -> Smart Search -> Indexing (Figure 2)

Figure 2: Indexing

Customizing

After activation and indexing you have to decide whether you want to use the Smart Search Module and/or a Search Link in the Navigation. In both case you have the Autocompletion and the stemming (did you mean) feature (Figure 3, Figure 4)

Figure 3: Autocompletion

Figure 4: Stemming

You have several self explaining settings available to use predefined searches.

You find a summary in the Joomla documentation (http://docs.joomla.org/Smart_Search_configuration_options)

Removing the classic Joomla Search

If you decided to use Smart Search, you can remove the classic Joomla search:

• deactivate or delete all module of the type search (Extensions -> Modules -> Filter for type search)
• deactivate or delete all plug-ins of the type search (Extensions -> Plug-Ins -> Filter for type search)
• delete all menu links to the search component