The standard WooCommerce search looks for the exact letters you typed. "Notebok", "ноутбак", "AB 123-45" instead of "AB12345" — and the shopper sees "No products were found" while the product is right there. Smart Search fixes that without sending your catalogue to an outside service: it keeps its own compact index in your WordPress database and answers from it.
What shoppers get
- Typos are forgiven. One typo in words of 4–6 letters, two in longer words; swapped letters count as one typo. "Showing results for …" tells the shopper what was searched.
- SKUs the way people type them. "AB-123 45", "ab12345" and "AB 12345" all find AB12345; Cyrillic letters that look like Latin ones (А, В, С, Е, Н, К, М, О, Р, Т, Х) are read as Latin. The exact SKU comes first.
- Ukrainian and Russian spellings together. "телевізор" finds "Телевизор", "мило" finds "Мыло": і/и/ы, є/е/э, ї, ґ and the apostrophe are matched automatically.
- Word forms. "чохли" finds "чохла", "headphones" finds "headphone".
- Live suggestions under the search field: product image, price, SKU, the categories the results are in, "All results (N)". Keyboard navigation, works on mobile, no jQuery.
- Ranked results page. Name and SKU matches first, then categories and brands; products in stock before sold-out ones. The shopper can still sort by price or popularity.
What the shop owner gets
- An index that updates itself when a product, its stock or its category changes; big imports are indexed in the background.
- The first build runs in the background after activation; the shop keeps its standard search until the index is ready.
- A search tester in the admin: type like a shopper, see the results and the time it took.
- WP-CLI:
wp catcode-srch reindex, wp catcode-srch search "query", wp catcode-srch stats.
- A ready-made form:
[catcode_srch_search].
Fast on big catalogues
A search reads the vocabulary, the entries of the few words it picked and the rows of the winners — never the products table with LIKE. The index lives in five small tables with the keys the queries need.
Where the data goes
Nowhere. The index is built from your products and stays in your database; suggestions are served by your own site through the WordPress REST API (
/wp-json/catcode-srch/v1/suggest). No external requests, no tracking.