E-Commerce search is built from keywords, filters (for stock availability for instance), and aggregations (for attributes facets).
Keywords search is usually tuned with analysers (stemming, lemming, N-Grams…).
But LLM models and vector search are now mature enough to replace this keyword tuning with semantic.
Therefore, e-commerce will either be:
– An inverted search augmented with LLM embeddings and vector search
– A vector search augmented with filters and aggregations
And we indeed now see a convergence of Lucene vs Vector engines: the former to use vectors, the later to use filters/aggregations.
You can install and compare Elasticsearch, Solr, Algolia and Weaviate on your own WooCommerce: https://wpsolr.com
