When we visit a website or an eCommerce, and it has a search box, we go directly to it, expecting it to solve our questions. And indeed, that is the sole purpose of internal search engines on websites: to serve as a “dialogue” element between the brand and the user.
That’s why a search engine should be efficient enough to resolve the customer’s queries, providing the results they really expect to find. In this article, we selected the 6 best smart search engines to achieve an optimal eCommerce and to improve the conversions of an eCommerce (among them, we highlight the sponsored options from Marketing4eCommerce partners with shading and ⭐).
This work was done with the help of 58 industry experts and is part of our Ecommtech 2025 Guide, which you can download for free at the following link 👇
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These are the 9 best advanced search engines for your eCommerce:
Empathy Platform is an advanced product search and discovery solution powered by AI, designed to offer personalized shopping experiences focused on privacy and ethics. More than just a search engine, it suggests and inspires shoppers with new ideas to increase the average order value while always respecting customers’ personal data.
It pioneers the use of generative AI, enabling conversational, natural language responses similar to an in-store assistant. With Semantics AI, it automates synonym management and search optimization, freeing the merchandising team from manual tasks.
Its headless architecture and extensible microservices provide flexibility and scalability, while the control panel allows business teams to design and manage the experience without coding.
Its clients include companies like Carrefour, Kroger, Primor, and Tous.
Motive Commerce Search is an advanced search solution for eCommerce that combines power, privacy, and ease of use. Compatible with platforms like Shopify, PrestaShop, WooCommerce, and Magento 2, it allows integrating an AI-powered search engine in minutes through a simple plugin.
Key features include instant results, intuitive filters, recommended products, and a mobile-optimized interface. It offers no-code visual customization tools, letting brands tailor the search experience to their identity.
The control panel (Playboard) makes it easy to manage business rules, synonyms, and promotional banners, while its analytics system provides key insights without tracking users, fully GDPR-compliant.
With transparent pricing, Motive Commerce Search is an ideal choice for online stores looking to improve shopping experiences and increase conversions ethically and efficiently.
Leveraging AI techniques like NLP, it understands what the user is looking for, whether through text, images, or voice. It recognizes synonyms, corrects typos, proactively suggests products, and refines searches with filters — all at high speed.
It learns in real-time, personalizing search results and delivering precise reports. You can integrate it with any CMS platform.
It offers a 30-day free trial and plans starting from €39 per month. The website also features an ROI calculator.
This advanced search engine of French origin offers multiple solutions for all industries and skill levels, though it is more developer-oriented since it has a simple and robust API that allows building any search experience within business applications. Algolia also acquired Search.io (formerly Sajari), an intelligent tool with an algorithm capable of auto-completing and personalizing the search engine of any site or eCommerce.
It’s fast, secure, accurate, scalable, ultra-customizable, and integrates with major eCommerce platforms. It includes synonym suggestions and dynamic re-ranking.
Kimera analyzes and interprets your product images to instantly and automatically extract their characteristics. It connects user searches to the exact products they need, regardless of the words they use, understanding all languages, synonyms, slang, regionalisms, and expressions. It makes precise recommendations based on customer preferences and eliminates the need to manually tag items.
One of its standout solutions is the “Positioner,” which customizes search results to highlight promotional products or according to business needs. It also optimizes product visibility by prioritizing overstocked items in search results or organizing results by key product attributes like brand, color, or style.
AddSearch is an instant visual search engine for eCommerce that works on all devices and is easy to implement.
It lets you leverage search to drive traffic to the most important pages of your site. It has autocomplete, makes suggestions, excludes or includes content.
It shows what users search for and how often, and whether they find it. With that information, you can build a FAQs page, highlight the most searched content, tag pages with keywords, and create a synonym library.
Constructor is a product discovery and search platform for eCommerce, powered by AI and designed to optimize key metrics like revenue, conversion rate, and average order value. Its Native Commerce Core architecture integrates components like search, autocomplete, category navigation, personalized recommendations, dynamic collections, interactive quizzes, and an AI shopping agent. These elements work together to deliver personalized shopping experiences in real time, adapting to each user’s behavior.
The platform allows you to set merchandising rules, automatically enrich product attributes, and access predictive analytics for informed decision-making. It also offers connectors to easily integrate product catalogs from various platforms and REST APIs for flexible implementation. Its API-first approach and composable architecture facilitate integration with existing systems, enabling customization and scalability to meet business goals.
Coveo is an AI-based generative search and experience platform, designed to deliver relevant and personalized results in enterprise environments. Its cloud architecture allows integrating and unifying content from multiple sources, both on-premise and cloud, into a single centralized index.
Key features include semantic search, automated recommendations via machine learning, generative AI-based responses, and unified content personalization. The platform lets you create dynamic search interfaces that adapt to user context and behavior, improving result relevance. It also offers real-time analytics tools to monitor search performance and adjust strategies based on metrics.
Its modular and scalable approach adapts to the specific needs of each business.
Apisearch is a search engine designed for eCommerce and applications that need to handle large volumes of data. It allows customizing the search engine with support for dynamic filters, autocomplete, and suggestions as the user types.
It supports real-time queries, handling thousands of searches per second without compromising speed or accuracy. It includes an admin panel to easily configure and monitor the search engine’s performance, as well as tools to index and update data automatically. It also provides detailed metrics to analyze user behavior in searches.
Its architecture is designed to be scalable and compatible with various technologies and environments, and it can be deployed either in the cloud or on-premise, adapting to different technical needs.
In September 2024, it was acquired by Empathy.co.
This top is a simplification to make it easier for you to find solutions, but there are also other internal search engines that can work perfectly for your business. These are, listed alphabetically: Celebros, Datafari, Ecommfinder, ExpertRec Smart Search, Klevu, Kimera, Prefixbox, SniperFast, Typesense, and Wizzy.
Photo: ChatGPT and Canva.
Great roundup! It’s impressive to see how much impact a good on-site search engine can have on user experience and conversion rates. While tools like Doofinder and others on this list are well-known, there are also other strong players in this space—ExpertRec, for example, offers a customizable and fast search engine that many eCommerce sites have found effective in boosting engagement and sales. Always good to explore all available options based on your site’s specific needs.
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