Research

What we found when we actually looked.

We build catalog search, so we have an interest in what follows. We have tried to make it useful anyway — the method is stated, the limitations are stated, and where a competitor is the right answer we say so.

Field researchJuly 20268 min read

We tested the search on twenty distributor websites. One typo broke most of it.

Category terms worked almost everywhere. Then we misspelled one letter in “circuit breaker” and several national distributors — running the best-known search platforms on the market — returned nothing at all. The finding we did not expect: paying for a search vendor did not predict having good search.

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LandscapeJuly 202611 min read

Every catalog search vendor in 2026, and who each one is actually for.

Algolia, Coveo, HawkSearch, Klevu, Searchspring, Constructor, Elasticsearch, Solr, Typesense, Meilisearch and ours. Written by a company that sells one of them, which we say up front — and several sections end by telling you to buy someone else.

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AnalysisJuly 20269 min read

What catalog search actually costs over five years.

The subscription is the number everyone compares, and it is rarely the biggest one. A five-year model covering infrastructure, integration, the relevance maintenance nobody books, and the largest cost of all — the customer who could not find the product and left.

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