Site search users convert at multiples of browsers - and Magento’s default Elasticsearch search, while solid infrastructure, is a weak merchandiser. The two serious upgrades are Adobe’s Live Search (SaaS) and ElasticSuite (open source). They solve overlapping problems differently, and choosing well depends on your catalogue size, budget and who does your merchandising.
Stock Elasticsearch/OpenSearch: The Baseline
Free, fast, keyword-based. With synonym curation and attribute weighting it is adequate for small catalogs with simple queries. It lacks: behavioural learning, visual merchandising, decent typo tolerance and search analytics worth the name. If search is a meaningful revenue driver, it is a floor, not a strategy.
Adobe Live Search
SaaS search and merchandising for Adobe Commerce (included in the licence):
- Sensei-powered relevance: behavioural learning re-ranks results by what actually gets clicked and bought
- Merchandising UI: pin, boost and bury products per search term; rules for categories
- Faceted search with intelligent filtering, plus the Product Recommendations sibling service
- Category merchandising replaces the default category sort
Strengths: zero infrastructure (the index lives in Adobe’s cloud, synced via SaaS export), genuinely good relevance out of the box, merchandising a marketer can run. Limitations: Adobe Commerce only, catalogue size and locale limits to check, and the SaaS data pipeline (catalog sync) is another moving part to monitor - when it breaks, search quietly goes stale.
ElasticSuite
Open-source module layering a full search and merchandising stack on your own Elasticsearch/OpenSearch:
- Relevance tuning: field weights, fuzzy matching, spell correction far beyond stock
- Virtual categories: rule-based categories that maintain themselves (“all in-stock red dresses under £50”)
- Merchandising: drag-and-drop category and search-term merchandising in admin
- Autocomplete, “did you mean”, and layered navigation improvements
Strengths: Open Source-compatible, self-hosted (your data stays yours), mature, and the virtual categories alone transform catalogue management for some merchants. Limitations: you own the infrastructure and the tuning; no behavioural learning without extra work.
Choosing
- Adobe Commerce, marketing-led team, want managed: Live Search
- Open Source or control-minded, comfortable owning search ops: ElasticSuite
- Small catalogue, tight budget: tuned stock search + disciplined synonyms, revisit later
Some stores run both - ElasticSuite for category navigation and Live Search for search - but start with one; dual stacks are an operational burden.
Whichever you choose, wire up the feedback loop: weekly review of top zero-result searches and top queries with low click-through. Search merchandising is never finished - but it is some of the highest-leverage merchandising work in the store, because searchers are telling you exactly what they want.