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Hello everyone,

I am currently using Solspace’s Super Search on a site and have had pretty good success. I was thinking about giving Low Search a try and am wondering if anyone has experience with both.

I need to search channel entries based on keywords and/or categories and refine the results based on other standard and custom fields. The number of searchable entries will be <1k so I don’ think performance will be a big factor.

Has anyone used both of these? Is one easier to use? Any input would be appreciated. Thanks,

Garrett

Hi Garrett,

Super Search (SS) and Low Search (LS) are similar, but both have features the other doesn’t have. For instance, SS has a readable/hackable URI, LS uses an encoded non-hackable search string. SS can also search for category names, while LS only lets you filter results by category ID. On the other hand, LS allows for fuzzy searches, while SS does not, and LS filters out any HTML and converts diacritics in its search index, so searches are “cleaner” (ie. a search for “table” will not return entries with the HTML-element <table> in it). Also, LS’s search collections lets you be very precise in what to search and what not.

As for creating forms and filters, I’ve tried to make it as easy as possible to create re-usable search forms. Check out the form tag example to see what you can do. Basically, you can use any of the channel:entries parameters as input fields in your form, which makes it very flexible.

Any advice for searching on PDF attachments?

The only way to search PDFs or other documents, is to use Google. You could use Low GoogleSearch, which works with either a Google Mini, Google Search Appliance or hosted (and paid) Google Site Search. Other search options will only search what’s in the DB, not in actual files.

Low - For your Google Search, what about Google Custom Search? Or is that just another name for the Google Search products mentioned?

The naming is confusing, anyway. But you’ll need to be able to get XML output from the custom search, which is only available for the paid version, if I’m not mistaken.

In a different kind of site (ecommerce using Magento platform) we used Google custom search and it worked brilliantly. Easy to integrate and you can customize the look of it to a certain extent. The custom search prices are based off of volume. The prices are very reasonable as well.

Isn’t there a free version of custom search? And isn’t that just a riff off of their site search model? Or am I confusing Google products? Again? 😊

Isn’t there a free version of custom search?

There is, but it’s limited. Most importantly, it doesn’t return its results in XML, so integration in your site is far less seamless than it can be.

Oh I see. Thanks.

So while the free version’s results can be somewhat customized, they can’t be fully customized to the point of being seamlessly integrated into the hosting site. 

Thanks. That helps.

Just to chime in here - ChiefAlchemist, you can have a look at my Google Custom Search module, which may suit your requirements for a google-powered search that uses native EE tags, and does not require a paid account or a Google search appliance.

Thx D. Looks good.

Once we nail the e-comm add-on down I’ll recast my search for search solution net.