Indigothorn Product Search

Shoppers type "sneakres", "trampki" or "red dress L" and expect results. The default WooCommerce search matches exact words only, so these searches often end with "No products were found".

Indigothorn Product Search keeps its own product index and ranks results by relevance:

• Typos: "runnning shoes", "headphnes" and "desk lmap" still find the right products.
• Synonyms: built-in shop vocabulary in English, Polish and German (sneakers = trampki = Turnschuhe, phone = smartphone = smartfon, red = czerwona = rot …), plus your own synonym groups.
• Attributes and SKUs: colours, sizes, categories and tags are searchable; an exact SKU always comes first.
• Multilingual shops: with WPML or Polylang, shoppers only see products in the language they are browsing (untranslated products are shown in every language), and your own synonym groups can be limited to one language.
• In-stock first: products you can ship rank above out-of-stock ones (optional).
• Live suggestions in your product search boxes, with images and prices. Lightweight, no jQuery, keyboard accessible.
• "Searches that found nothing" report: see what customers wanted and could not find. It stores only the search terms and counts: no IP addresses or accounts, terms that look like an e-mail address or phone number are skipped, and terms are deleted after 90 days without a search. You can turn it off.
• Click-through rate: see how often shoppers open a product after searching a term, how often they pick a live suggestion, and which searches find products nobody clicks. Clicks are anonymous counters (no IP addresses, accounts or visitor IDs are stored) and follow the analytics switch. A click only counts for a term and product the shop really showed, and each visitor can send at most 20 click events in 10 minutes (counted under a hashed key that changes every 10 minutes).
• Pinned and hidden products: for a search term, show chosen products first (in your order) or never show some products. Only published products that are visible in search can be pinned.
• Variation results: a search for "blue shirt medium" opens the shirt with the blue, medium variation selected, and live suggestions show that variation's price, image and stock. Disabled variations are never linked.
• Optional semantic search: connect your own AI provider (any OpenAI-compatible embeddings API) for intent queries like "shoes for asphalt running". Off by default.

Add a search box anywhere with [indigothorn_product_search], or keep using your theme's WooCommerce product search, which is enhanced automatically.

On a test catalogue of 300 products with 40 typical shop searches (exact names and SKUs, typos, synonyms and English/Polish names, colour plus product type, words from descriptions), the right product was in the top three for:

• Indigothorn Product Search: 40 of 40, without any AI key;
• the default WooCommerce search: 15 of 40;
• two popular free search plugins, out of the box: 8 and 30 of 40.

The test catalogue and searches were written together with this plugin, so treat the numbers as a fair comparison of the same searches, not as a promise for every shop.

With 5,000 products, a search takes about 5 ms inside the plugin (repeated searches are cached), and indexing runs in the background at about 7 ms per product. Live suggestions add about 40 ms to a request compared with WooCommerce's own product endpoint on the same server.