Partial Matching when Searching

[WillStrohl]

Is your feature request related to a problem?

Please describe.
Scenario: Customers know the SKU's for products and want to find everything under a specific SKU pattern. For example, imagine a store sells collectibles. The SKU's for all Superman comic books may begin with "CMC-001" but each Superman comic may be something like, "CMS-001-3324-121".

Describe the solution you'd like

The search should allow for partial matches. For example, all Superman comic books should be in the search results, based on the partial match. All products with a SKU beginning with "CMC-001" would appear in the search results.

Since this could be considered a breaking change to some existing stores, this feature should be added as an optional configuration choice, defaulting to on. Normally, we'd want to default to a new feature being turned off by default, but a partial search could be an enhanced user experience for customers of existing stores.

There needs to be a new setting added to the store for controlling the search results partially matching. The current administration views makes the best place for this setting to be in the Views Manager view. Like other admin setting views, there is room for the new setting on the right side, by following the same UX pattern as other views (e.g., Admin > Orders).

Describe alternatives you've considered

Technically, in many stores, the search filters could be a viable solution, but this is not the case when a store has 10k+ products.

Additional context

This setting and feature should be built in a way that takes into consideration stores with a larger number of products in their catalog (e.g., 4,000 or more products and 100 or more categories). Any pull request should be tested against this scenario.