Features

KonaKart has been engineered to manage product catalogs containing hundreds of thousands of products. In order to search for these products in an efficient manner, KonaKart may be configured to use the Apache Solr enterprise search server based on the Lucene Java search library.

This powerful technology not only provides for a lightning fast search experience, but also incorporates intelligence to correct common problems such as misspellings and plurals which often frustrate shoppers making them go elsewhere. For example, the words Television, Televisions, TV, TVs can all be configured to find televisions. It may also be configured to provide phonetic searches in order to find words which sound like the search keyword.

KonaKart allows a configurable way to use the powerful faceted search functionality of Solr by allowing different facets to be defined for different product types. The facet information returned by SOLR contains quantity information with the most popular items at the top of the list.

Digital Download .txt and .pdf files may also be indexed in the search engine, and text fragments (snippets) surrounding the search keywords may be returned so that the context of the search result can be determined.

The KonaKart suggested search functionality uses Solr terms. For each product, a number of terms are stored. The suggested search list is ordered by popularity of the term, so the more times a term has been saved, the greater chance it has of appearing in the search list. The default terms stored for each product are:

• The category name(s) of the product. i.e. Televisions
• The name of the product manufacturer. i.e. Sony
• The name of the product. i.e. Vaio
• The name of the product model. i.e. VPC-EB42FX
• The name of the category by manufacturer. i.e. Televisions by Sony, Televisions by Philips
• The name of the manufacturer in a category. i.e. Sony in Televisons, Sony in Computers

Each term is indexed with metadata containing the category, product and manufacturer ids so when a customer clicks on a term such as “Sony in Televisions” he is directed to a category view, displaying Sony products within the Televisions category. At this point he can choose another manufacturer remaining within the category and / or can apply extra filters such as screen size, LED, LCD etc. if the category has been set up with product tags to allow faceted search.