One e-commerce website, two search engines, two distinct challenges
An Israeli online grocery retailer with Hebrew product content needed to serve customers searching in multiple languages while making internal order lookup fast enough for everyday customer service operations.
WPSOLR connects two search engines to support these different requirements: Weaviate for customer-facing semantic search and Elasticsearch for internal order search.
1. Frontend: multilingual search that understands customer intent
The storefront uses Weaviate hosted by Weaviate for multilingual and semantic product search, combined with OpenAI technology to help address the challenges of searching Hebrew product content using queries in five languages.
Instead of relying only on exact keyword matches, semantic search helps customers find relevant products when their query expresses an intent, describes a need, or uses different wording from the product catalogue.
Key capabilities include:
- Search queries in five languages against Hebrew content.
- Semantic retrieval to match queries by meaning and intent, not just exact terms.
- Search suggestions that are heavily used by returning customers.
- Add-to-basket actions directly from suggestions, reducing friction between product discovery and purchase.
2. Backend: million orders search reduced from around one minute to under one second
Internal order search had a serious usability problem: finding orders among millions could take around a minute. Customer service staff were frustrated by the wait, making a routine task unnecessarily slow.
With Elasticsearch hosted on Elastic Cloud (elastic.co) powering backend order search through WPSOLR, lookup time dropped from approximately one minute to under one second.
Staff can search orders using customer details such as name and address, making it much faster to locate the right order and continue helping the customer.
That changes the experience from waiting for a search to return to getting results almost immediately.
3. One integration layer, two specialized search engines
The use case demonstrates how WPSOLR can connect WordPress and WooCommerce workflows to different search technologies according to the job each needs to do:
- Weaviate hosting: multilingual, semantic product search and intent-based discovery.
- Elastic Cloud: fast internal order lookup using customer details.
- WPSOLR: the integration layer connecting these search capabilities to the WordPress/WooCommerce environment.
The result is not one search engine forced to handle every task. It is two specialized search experiences: one helping customers discover products, the other helping staff find orders quickly.
The takeaway: multilingual product discovery for shoppers, and backend order search that goes from roughly 60 seconds to less than one second.