products dont appear to search pro suggestions too quickly

[aksulaattoriParticipant]

hello from finland!

i just ordered you product again to get support for our massive online store. we’ve run it now for a year with your search, but the support ended during autumn. so maybe you’ve seen this email earlier, don’t get confused.

we are running a huge woocommerce record store with about 17000 items at the moment. we have of course artists and bands, that have records with certain data, like price and the format. these are the things that we want to find with the search

jaansarkija.fi

we have ajax search pro taking care of the search on top of the service. we run it with index table. the cron goes through the system on hourly basis. it has been working quite well, of course there has been a lot of investigation and such to figure out how the thing actually works.

the most common problem is to get the new products very quickly to be seen in the search system. we use wp all import most of the time, as we bring in 10-500 items in at the same time. sometimes we bring in individual products manually. normally we import new stuff on weekly basis.

sometimes it happens that everything goes smoothly, no problems. but sometimes the system kinda skips certain info and getting the record visible in the search box is slower.

now, for example some new imported lou reed – albums:
– the search with quick type “lou reed” and enter brings us three albums. these are all very old imports.
– the suggestion “lou reed” shows 9 albums, and by clicking this u see every lou reed album
– the product list with images shows only 3 albums, and it is missing the latest imported products

why is it like this? the behaviour of the search engine seems to be a bit random. sometimes it puts everything on place very quickly, sometimes it never goes there.

any guidance or advice is most welcome! pls go through our search system – right now it might be a bit overtuned, as i again tried to fix it with new search parameters. what do you see is the most obvious problem for us? i realize that the amount of the data is quite large!

our artist / band – attribute is a product feature, if that helps u…

thanx, so eager to see what you guys have in mind!

yours,

aki ala-kokko,
finland

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[Ernest MarcinkoKeymaster]

Hi!

Thank you for the proper details. I may have an idea why those items are not showing up as they supposed to.

So, the index table reports that every product object is indexed, which seems to be correct. What I noticed is however that the ‘lou reed’ text is stored within a custom field named ‘pa_esittaja’. That is strange, because it should be indexed, and it should return it as a result, as it is selected for indexing.

However you mentioned that the items are getting imported – and that may be one of the causes of the issue. The plugin indexes each item whenever it is created, when WordPress sends a ‘save_post’ signal. On that signal, ajax search pro parses through all the selected fields, and stores them in the index table. However, some import tools does not import all the information at once, but create the object (then immediately send the signal), store it and then add the additional information (custom fields, taxonomy terms etc..) to the database. In this case however the ‘signal’ is too early, and not all the information is available yet. The search will not find the additional information during the CRON job, as it is already marked as indexed, and it cannot go thourgh all the recent items, as it would take minutes/hours of wasted server time. This could explain why the ‘lou reed’ yielded no results, as that custom field was not yet available when indexing.

I did the following to try to resolve this issue:
– I have disabled the ‘save on post’ feature: https://i.imgur.com/tGu5hx0.png
This will make sure that the items are not indexed upon creation, but later on during a cron job. It will also prevent the missing information due to the early signal.
– I have also recreated the index table, which now should be correct. Previously it contained around 172k records, now it’s over 333k, so there was missing informatio there.

This will hopefully prevent the issue from re-occuring. Please also note that you have a search query cache enabled and set to 1 day to expire, so new items for the same phrase may take up to 1 day to appear.

I hope this helps!

Best,
Ernest Marcinko
If you like my products, don't forget to rate them on codecanyon :)

[aksulaattoriParticipant]

hey man! thnx for the quick reply and your wise thoughts on our service! i am pretty sure the real problem is the fact that our artist / band is a custom field, a product attribute. it is hidden too far in the code, and causes all these problems.

but now some new issues!

1. now, after your doings in the search box, we are missing both the price and the format from our product suggestions next to the image, this needs to be corrected asap! the stuff should be there according to this page: https://jaansarkija.fi/wp-admin/admin.php?page=asp_settings&asp_sid=1#7 (advanced options / content)

2. still issues with lou reed:
– https://jaansarkija.fi/kauppa/poprock/the-blue-mask/ this product is in the list
– https://jaansarkija.fi/kauppa/poprock/berlin/ this product is not in the list

both products imported at the same time on 2.1.2018 at 18.16. this is so weird!

all the help needed!

aksu

[aksulaattoriParticipant]

now, also, the search is rather slow.

i am sure i have some unnecessary things to search / index. any help on this is appreciated. basicly we just need to show the people some suggestions about the artist and his products, the price and the format.

thnx!!

aksu

[aksulaattoriParticipant]

one more:

it seems that now our search shows only 6 products with images in the search box. where can i adjust this number – we used to have larger amount of visible products there! this is of course one of the problems, as it is limited to 6 instead of 16 for example…

thnx!

aksu

[aksulaattoriParticipant]

yo man!

i am not sure, if u did something for the site, but now i can see every product suggestion that i can imagine! this is wonderful! i am not sure if this is because of the time spent (a night well slept) or if u tweeked the search somehow, but now it really has a lot more products in it.

but one IMPORTANT thing:

as mentioned before on my first answer to you, we used to have prices and formats mentioned below the title and the artist! now they are gone! this is very vital information! where are they?

thnx man,

aksu

[Ernest MarcinkoKeymaster]

Hi,

I checked the configuration yesterday, and was able to find some of the issues, but I did not have time to reply. Here is everything:
– The price and format was not showing, as this option was disabled: https://i.imgur.com/U2GmWJh.png
I have turned it on, it should start showing the content now.
– The number of results is not correct as you had this option enabled: https://i.imgur.com/PTugEWo.png
This distributed the limit by post type, and since you have 8 selected, it distributed 50 by 8, so 6 items by post type. I have turned this off, now it will look for 50 matches overall. This was also the cause why the https://jaansarkija.fi/kauppa/poprock/berlin/ item was not in the list – it was simply cut off. Now it should be correct.

Best,
Ernest Marcinko
If you like my products, don't forget to rate them on codecanyon :)

[aksulaattoriParticipant]

Love ya!

This is superb!

All the best!

Aksu

[Ernest MarcinkoKeymaster]

You cannot access this content. Best,
Ernest Marcinko
If you like my products, don't forget to rate them on codecanyon :)

[aksulaattoriParticipant]

hello sir.

many many thanx for making our site so good! after these changes, basicly all the service is now much faster, it seems that the whole site is now much faster, stronger, healthier.

the most recent issue came just a while ago. it is hard to notice these errors right away, as they seem to be quite rare. but every once in a while you see something that just doesnt make any sense.

ok, we imported new products succesfully.

in the excel, there was 2 products by the band BLACK REBEL MOTORCYCLE CLUB. they where next to each other in seperate rows. the band has a new album out, called WRONG CREATURES.

now if u type that into search bar, you see that the DIGIPAK version of this cd does not have the band name after the album title.

both albums can be seen in all the lists possible. but in the ajax search box product suggestions we are missing the name of the band.

we’ve done the DIGIPAK-versions for ages, and they have worked well so far. it looks like some random error.

this kinda error was a familiar case before you did your trick, and now it seems that its ALMOST solved, but sometimes shit still happens.

do you have any idea, what would be the reason for this odd behaviour?

thnx again!

yours,

aksu

[Ernest MarcinkoKeymaster]

Hi Aksu,

It was due to a misconfiguration in the title field. The secondary title field was set to a custom field, which was not correct, I have fixed it here: https://i.imgur.com/ChBuaN8.png

Now it should show all titles correctly.

Best,
Ernest Marcinko
If you like my products, don't forget to rate them on codecanyon :)

[aksulaattoriParticipant]

whooa!

superb! thnx so much!

what is the reason for the band names and artists to be without Capitals, without the First big letter? Can we change it so that is has a Big first letter, or so that they are ALL CAPITALS.

yeah,

aksu

[aksulaattoriParticipant]

i mean this happens again in the search box suggestions, after the album title.

aksu

[Ernest MarcinkoKeymaster]

Hi!

It is because that is how they are stored within the database, the plugin just re-prints it without any transformation.

I would suggest this simple custom CSS to simply change the title to upper case:

.asp_res_url {
    text-transform: uppercase !important;
}

That should do the trick.

Best,
Ernest Marcinko
If you like my products, don't forget to rate them on codecanyon :)

[aksulaattoriParticipant]

hmm,

is it really so? the band names are correct in the band-suggestions of the search box. The excel at least has Big first letters.

Anyhow, this css great, but it changes EVERYTHING BIG, EVEN THE ALBUM TITLES. any trick, how we would see only the pa_esittaja, the BAND and the ARTIST with capitals only??

thnx!

aksu

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