Important note:  This article men­tions several in­stant­ly recog­nisable brand names; there’s no­thing inher­ently wrong with the com­panies or or­gan­i­sa­tions behind those names.  The pur­pose of this ar­ticle is to warn readers about frau­dulent “re­search” claim­ing that these busi­ness­es use Joomla.

If you’re wondering what “well known” organisations—recognisable, iconic brands—are currently using Joomla to power their websites, you’ll probably do what most people do:  use your favourite search engine and search for “businesses using Joomla”.  Joomla is used to power a lot of websites on the internet but, when you look at the results of your query you may be wondering if what you’re seeing is for real.

“What?”, you ask, “eBay uses Joomla to power their websites!”.source: https://community.joomla.org/blogs/community/ebay-chooses-joomla.html.  This announcement—in 2010—is used as “authoritative research” by other commentators.  The eBay community portal uses Lithium CMS today. Well of course eBay—a $27 billion company with twelve and-a-half thousand employees—doesn’t use Joomla to power one of the largest global online marketplaces in the world.  eBay doesn’t use Joomla; nor does the Harvard University, Lipton Tea, Holiday Inn hotels, the Guggenheim museum, General Electric or, would you believe, Linux.  These organisations and businesses do not use Joomla; we cannot verify if any of them have ever used Joomla.  But that’s not what dozens of websites are saying.  We’ll look at what’s really at play here and so that you understand the truth behind these long-playing scams.

The source of much of this false narrative was an article published on the Joomla! Community Magazine™ in 2012.10 Most Popular Websites Using Joomla!, Joomla! Community Magazine, 1-Jul-2012..  Let’s look at the websites listed there:

The J! CMS always had a basic search component and, with the release of Joomla! 2.5New Features in Joomla! 2.5—if anyone can remember that far back—the J! CMS has incorporated a Google-like content in­dex­ing/pre­dic­tive text feature that allows users to “guess” for what you may be looking for.  With the release of J! 4.x, the basic search component was retired leaving only the “smart” search component.

I’ve just migrated from Joomla 3 to Joomla 4.  Read all the articles concerning smart search and deleted the old Jooma 3 search package.  I followed the steps concerning the indexation of the contents with the smart search component and, suddenly, my database exceeded the limit because of a rise in 97 Mb for the indexation of more than 300 articles.  Is there a way to dodge this or am I “condemned” to buy more disk space from my provider?a forum user, Joomla forum, 27-Jun-2023

This article will attempt to answer some of the misgivings and concerns that people have about using Joomla’s “new” smart search component.  Bear in mind that there’s actually nothing new about this feature; it’s been around since 2012.  The only news here is that the old basic search component was removed from J! 4.0 in 2021.  Various attemptshttps://github.com/joomla-extensions/search to resuscitate that component seem to have been abandoned and it’s unlikely efforts will be made in future.  While some people may be disappointed that the old search component no longer exists from J! 4.x, or they may feel that a “smart” search tool is overkill for their needs, let’s look at what people need to know before they implement smart search indexing, what options impact on the indexer, or whether other (i.e. external) searching may be better.