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Instant Search Documentation

Nop Instant Search is a search auto-complete plugin for nopCommerce, which allows your customers to find the right products in seconds. It is highly configurable to allow store owners to customize the search results for a most enjoyable shopping experience.

Live DEMO - see how the Nop Instant Search plugin would look like in your public store.

Admin DEMO - see the plugin administration.

Working with the Nop Instant Search is as easy as configuring a few settings from the administration of the plugin. When the plugin is installed it comes preconfigured with default values for the settings.

Please read the following steps for more information on how to configure the Nop Instant Search.

General Settings

These settings could be found in almost every plugin. They are responsible for showing the plugin in your public store and enabling your customers to use its functionality.

  1. Enable Instant Search - Sets whether the Nop Instant Search is enabled.
  2. Enable category Search - Set whether the functionality for choosing specific top level category to search in is enabled. 

Advanced Settings

From this section you could control your search phrazes, results, appearance and in what parts of your products to search.

  1. Minimum Keyword Lenth - this is the minimum number of characters that need to be typed before the instant search is triggered. Note that you can't make this lower that 3 and you can only increase the number otherwise the Nop Instant Search might work extreemly slow. Actually the recommended setting is 3 or 4 and this is a number that a lot of the most popular shops are using.
  2. Number of Products - the number of products returned from the search. This is a way to limit the search result and show only some of the products. Note that if the number of products is more that the products that can fit in the autocomplete results window then a scroll bar will appear.
  3. Product Picture Size (pixels) - This is the size of the pictures that are shown in the dropdown window. Note that by changing it you might need to also change the InstantSearch.css styles.
  4. Highlight first element - Highlight first element in the search results from auto complete dropdown. This will allow you to choose whether or not to go to first found item or search results page, when Enter is pressed.
  5. Search in Descriptions - this option allows searching not only in the product name but also in the description of the product. Note that for stores with thousands of products setting this option can make searching much slower.
  6. Visible Individually Only - This setting will allow you to search only for products which are visible individually.