Configure Search
Search Functionality
What is search functionality and why it is important?
Search Functionality refers to the search box that users typically find on top of the webpage. It helps users find the desired information/products by typing in their search queries in the search box. Depending on the business, at least 10%-20% of the website visitors leverage search to discover the products they would like to buy.
What are the different features available on ACP search functionality?
- Auto suggest- Auto suggestions helps users key in search queries either by suggesting correct spellings or by suggesting complete search queries.
- Adding items to cart from search suggestions: Using this feature brands can enable their users to add items to cart directly from search-suggestions. This feature is relevant for websites/apps where products are standardized & there isn’t much that users get from visiting the product pages. For example, grocery.
- Spell correct - Making spelling mistakes while keying in search queries is quite natural. Using this configuration brands can show relevant search results to users even if the user keys in incorrect spellings.
- Configure synonyms - Search functionality on ACP platforms works on exact keyword matches. But configuring synonyms brands can define their industry specific keywords as synonyms and language specific alternatives to improve the search experience.
- Configure stop words - By configuring stopwords, brands can define keywords that are to be ignored if present in the search query. A typical use case would be adding “Spykar” as a stopword; so that users searching for “Spykar Jeans” still end up getting search results corresponding to Jeans.
- Category-wise search - Brands can enable their users to search either the whole catalog or within a category.
- For example, for a marketplace like Amazon which has a wide range of categories - searching for “Apple” can show users fruits as well as the “Apple company products”.
- By Category specific search, users can convey that they are looking for “Apple in Electronics category” thereby, getting relevant search results.
Configuring search experience
You can configure the following aspects of search experience by navigating to Settings > Configure Search screen
- Enable Auto Suggestions for search text - By enabling this configuration you can start giving users suggestions to complete/rectify their search queries. These suggestions are purely based on dictionaries created from the catalog data which you can create by choosing the appropriate search fields.
- Group products by category in search results page - By enabling this configuration you can group products by their categories on search results pages. Doing so can make navigation to the desired product easier.
- Enable Department Wise - By enabling this configuration you can help users have an explicit option to search within a particular category or across all categories.
- Display Product in search only when all words of user query are found in product information - By enabling this configuration you can ensure that only those products whose dictionary document(created on the basis of Search Fields selected) has all the search keywords gets displayed on the search results page.
- Include variant product count in filters - Click on it if you want to include the variant product counts in filters.
Search Fields
By using Search Fields you can configure which product fields must be searched across to generate the search results. By selecting the different fields on the Search Fields section you can choose the product parameters which should be used to create the dictionary to facilitate search.
By using the Boost By field, you can define what weightage that field must be given while sorting the product in the search results page. The Sort By: Relevance option that users get on the search results pages are powered by scores calculated on the basis of these Boost By field weightages.
Enabling spell correction while searching
Making spelling mistakes while typing is natural. It’s an issue that gets aggravated in non-English speaking countries. Several users end up typing phonetically similar versions of words.
On ACP you can configure your search such that it checks for possible spelling errors in the search keywords and gives search results corresponding to the correct spelling.
How to implement?
The search functionality tries looking for keywords against the defined Search Fields & replaces non-matching search keywords with the closest matching word in the dictionary.
- To get this feature working - Configure synonym feature must be activated (by raising a ticket to the Sustenance team) - this creates a brand specific dictionary for Search functionality to work.
- Check the flag “Enable spell correct while searching”.
- Uncheck the flag “Display product in search only when all words of user query are found in product information.” Currently, this functionality gets preference over the Spell correction - something that we intend to reverse soon.
Configure Synonyms
By configuring synonyms, brands can define their industry specific keywords as synonyms and language specific alternatives (for example - Hinglish words in India) to improve search experience.
This way, you can define alternate english or non-english words that users might search for; for example, searching for pants instead of trousers.
How to implement?
- A ticket needs to be raised with the Sustenance team at first to get the feature activated for brands.
- Once activated, CP users will be able to configure synonyms on Settings>Configure search section as shown below.
- Here, you can configure synonyms by entering them in synonymous words in comma separated format. Here, each line represents a set of words that needs to be considered synonyms of each other.
- Like templates, any change in the synonyms configuration needs to be approved by another user from the “Template Change requests” section & can be found under entity type “Search”. Once approved, re-indexing of Solr data takes place & the changes start reflecting on production subsequently.
NOTE
Re-indexing can lead to temporary issues on website showcases & we recommend approving these changes in off-business hours.
Stop Words
By configuring stopwords, brands can define keywords that are to be ignored in the search query. For example - users might end up trying "Spykar Jackets" and get zero results because "Spykar" doesn't feature in product attributes (such as its title or description).
Using stop words brands can add keywords like brand names, prepositions, articles and needs that are to be ignored.
How to implement?
- A ticket needs to be raised with the Sustenance team at first to get the feature activated for brands.
- Once activated, CP users will be able to configure synonyms on Settings>Configure search section as shown below.
- Here, you can configure stop words by entering them in each line separately.
- Like templates, any change in the stopwords configuration needs to be approved by another user from the “Template Change requests” section & can be found under entity type “Search”.
Once approved, re-indexing of Solr data takes place & the changes start reflecting on production subsequently.
NOTE
Re-indexing can lead to temporary issues on website showcases & we recommend approving these changes in off-business hours.
Updated almost 2 years ago