Best eCommerce Search Engine Providers

With exponential growth in global eCommerce sales, it’s mission-critical to offer the best solutions for your customers’ experience. The numbers tell us just last year retail eCommerce sales estimated $4.9 trillion, with forecasted growth by as much as 50% to 7.4 trillion by 2025.

How fast can your customers find exactly what they’re looking for with minimal effort, plus the valuable insights gleaned from that search into your customers’ behavior. Mobile optimization plays heavily into how your customer searches, as well as synonym results and autocorrect, with the goal to help to your customer zero in quickly on what they’re looking for, or nudge them towards results if their search is non-specific.

Site search capabilities go well beyond a bar at the top of your site. Think of site search is an engine fueling your customer experiences. It will inform and transform your digital commerce journey.

You’ll want to look at a few considerations and common terms as you evaluate site search vendors:

Scalability – your eCommerce solution must weather the unpredictable nature of an online marketplace. Your system must manage the highs of traffic and data without downtime and a total reliance on an IT team

Faceted Navigation and Filters – visual cue to narrow down search functions by the desired category such price, size, color, etc.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) – allows for brand name recognition or other identifiers in a product set so your customers don’t have to be exact in their search, yet still land on the desired result

Zero Results – a fix to queries that come up short to reduce the dreaded bounce rates

Artificial Intelligence – a significant driver in the future of eCommerce. AI is behind the highly personalized experiences your customer's demand

Just like any partner in your eCommerce solution, a search vendor needs to align with your business needs and goals and integrate well with your existing system.

Algolia

Headquarters: San Francisco, CA

Website: algolia.com

Overview: With a search as a service model, their product indexes clients' sites and so the search task is far simpler. The benefits include an easy implementation and the ability to make changes quickly as needed. Algolia is known for their expertise in advanced search functionality especially useful for catalog management.

Additional Resource: Elastic Path teamed up with Algolia and Contentful for an on-demand webinar on navigating and overcoming the barriers to the Composable Commerce approach. The presentation includes real life use cases and a Q&A.

AddSearch

Headquarters: Helsinki, Finland

Website: addsearch.com

Overview: AddSearch customers report back the flexibility and easy integration of the product, and point to its cost-effectiveness and exceptional customer service for small business users.

Azure Cognitive

Website: azure.microsoft.com

Azure Cognitive Search is the only cloud search service with built-in AI capabilities that enrich all types of information to easily identify and explore relevant content at scale.

Azure Cognitive Search service, provides indexing and query engine, persistent storage of search indexes that brands create and manage, and a query language for composing simple to complex queries.

Bloomreach

Headquarters: Mountain View, CA

Website: bloomreach.com

With applications for content management, site search, page management, SEO optimization and role-based analytics, Bloomreach is a central location for all players who manage customer experience to come together and intelligently drive business outcomes.

Coveo

Headquarters: Quebec, Canada

Website: coveo.com

Overview: Coveo touts search optimization for eCommerce applications, websites, and workplace enablement. Their solutions plug into any system regardless of tech stack; you can start from scratch or use their pre-built integrations. They score well with users for their analytics capabilities.

Google Cloud Search

Headquarters: Mountain View, CA

Website: cloud.google.com

Overview: Well-known market leader in search function. Using the powerful searching capabilities of Google, users are immediately able to enter their queries, look for contents and answers, and view search suggestions.

Handshake by Perficient

Website: perficient.com

Handshake is a modern Search Connector Framework that takes the guesswork out of getting content to index. Handshake for Elastic Path gives users complete control over the flow of data from Elastic Path to multiple search targets, securely and flexibly.

LucidWorks

Headquarters: San Francisco, CA

Website: lucidworks.com

Overview: Founded in 2008, LucidWorks initially provided support and consulting services for the Apache Lucene/Solr open-source search project; they are currently the largest supporter of open-source search industry-wide. They offer search, discovery, and analytics solutions from two platform products.

Sinequa

Headquarters: New York, NY

Website: sinequa.com

Overview: Sinequa’s search optimization expertise comes from large organizations with complex information layers such has government agencies. They score well in the marketplace for a smooth integration process.

Yext

Headquarters: New York, NY

Website: yext.com

Overview: Yext offers customized search and discovery experiences based on natural language understanding and AI. Their real-time search analytics provide even more insight into how users are searching and what questions they’re asking. They are known in the market for their multi-format support capabilities.

Site Search Informs the Journey – So What’s Next?

With so many players in the market, you’ll need to evaluate who best works for you as far as your digital maturity, and how you’ve mapped out your digital commerce metrics and goals. Bear in mind how crucial the omnichannel experience is for the future of eCommerce.

Meeting the customer where they are across multiple touchpoints with as little friction and effort as possible is the future and the now of digital commerce. A robust and intuitive search functionality is just the tip of the iceberg.

For more information and insights on how to begin your eCommerce transformation, check out Elastic Path’s Replatforming Guide, or see what’s new in our Resource Library.