How does a good e-commerce search work?

Question

How does a good e-commerce search work?

• I don't have hard coded categories and sub-categories to start with. People are not forced to categorize them.
• Tag based system will mean creation of manual tags by people. I mean for a deal of Apple Macbook it has to be classified as a laptop. So, a simple text tag based system doesnot work.Does it?
• Can we possibly customize Sphinx to work? If yes, How?
• Is it a possibility to create a tag tree based system where a subtree can be classified as a category or Subtree?

Answer 1

Usually it's the job of the merchant to classify his products in different sections. The way you could store tags in tightly related to the tool you are using to display / store them you are not going to manage it the same way if your are using a CMS like Drupal or if you are creating an application from scratch. What you could do is categorize yourself the products and add the tags as an additional classification tool. Tags are not really reliables. Sphinx and Apache Solr are customizable, again it depends on the tool that you are using but it's common to tweak the storage of the items that you are indexing.