Magento Performance: Search Type Selection
Magento allows to configure multiple ways to search in catalog. For community edition these options are “Like”, “Fulltext” and “Combine”. Like is the default method selected, but this is not the best method and is more resource consuming.
For better performance and results, “Fulltext” should be selected in this configuration. You can configure selection time by going to System » Catalog » Catalog Search » Search Type in Magento admin panel.
Fulltext searching feature is implemented with mysql fulltext searching. Fulltext search allows to make complex search against any text.
For fulltext searching Magento uses separate index maintained in MyISAM engine as InnoDB engine does not support fulltext indexes. Once you have enabled fulltext searching you should ensure that “Catalog Search Index” index is up to date. This can be done from System» Index Management and clicking on “Reindex Data” against “Catalog Search Index”.
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