Building a shopify search app that doesn’t suck, need your input
I’m working on a shopify search app. elasticsearch for fuzzy matching, fast autocomplete, and ai embeddings so it actually gets what customers mean instead of just keyword stuff. we’re adding filters now and trying not to half-ass it like most apps do.
Most search apps i’ve seen just expose shopify’s default stuff, vendor, type, tags, options, metafields. sure, you can add more metafields, but that’s still just slapping labels on products. it doesn’t understand them. i want smarter filters, traits that make sense for the whole catalog without merchants having to tag every single sku by hand.
Still figuring out the best way to do this. enrichment at index time? a taxonomy merchants control? some mix of both? not sure yet.
Anyone dealt with this on the merchant or dev side? What's your take on the enrichment?