Search Features

The system offers a robust search engine to help customers find products and other content quickly. Few features are more critical if your site has a product catalog that is at all extensive or complex. A good search function helps increase your site's overall usability, search engine optimization, and ecommerce conversion rates.

Topic covered in this document:

Core Search Function

The core search function is available to users in the header of every page of the customer interface.

The core search is based on the state-of-art Elastic Search search engine library, in use by hundreds of websites across the internet. With lightning speed, it returns products, categories, and brands that match the user's input, sorted by relevance. Factors that affect each product's relevance include the number of times the search term that was entered by the user appears in the product's name, description, and other text fields, and what portion of the overall text for the product is represented by the search term. By default, if the user enters more than one word, results will include products that contain any of the terms. Some fuzziness with respect to misspelling is allowed. In addition, related words such as "run," "ran," "running," etc. are matched by the search engine.

Faceted Search

As search results are displayed, by default, the system organizes the results for user using a Faceted Search widget.

There is no better way to intuitively review and narrow down a search than leveraging Faceted Search. At a glance, the user understands the overall structure of the results and can narrow it down with one or two more clicks. Faceted Search organizes the results into the following groups:

• Categories

• Brands

• Price Ranges

• Average Product Review Ratings

• Attributes and Options

• Custom Facets

Next to each value under each group, the user sees the count of products that match it, which is the key to helping the user narrow down their search. It takes the guesswork out of it.

Clicking on the checkbox next to each facet value filters the search to just those products. For maximum convenience, the results refresh immediately on the screen as the user clicks each checkbox. In addition, the other facet groups and counts are also refreshed. To widen the search again, the user simply unclicks the checkbox they just clicked. To narrow it down further, they can continue to select other facets. Very quickly and intuitively, they can find what they're looking for.

Paging and Sorting

In addition to Faceted Search, each listing of search results includes links to page through the results (if there is more than one page), and sort the results by name or price.

As with the faceted search widget, clicking on each of the paging and sorting links refreshes the contents of the results immediately on-screen.

Product Listings on Category and Brand Pages

Faceted Search and the paging and sorting functions are not just present when a search is performed. They also appear next to the product listings on Category and Brand Pages.

So, just as with the search results, users have the ability to use the Faceted Search widget to narrow down the products shown within the category. In the above example, they see the breakdown of products within each of the main category's subcategories. In addition, there's a breakdown of Brands, Price ranges, and even Glove Sizes.

Auto-Suggestions

Another extremely useful feature for customers searching products and other content is the auto-suggestion tool that is attached to the main search input box.

As the user types in a search term, the system pops up suggestions of products, categories, and brands that match the text they have entered. Before they even finish their query, they might see what they're looking for. Clicking the individual suggestion will take the user immediately to the product, category, or brand page, without even having to review the search results. Typing the "enter" key or clicking the search icon will submit the query as a search and return the regular search results (including the Faceted Search widget).

Administration of Search Features

Automated Reindexing

Each of the above search features are backed by a search index that is generated automatically in the back end of the system. The search index is automatically kept up to date whenever products, categories, or manufacturers (i.e. brands) are created, edited, or deleted via the Administrator.

In addition, on a regular basis in the background, the system will perform a complete reindex of the entire search index to make sure any changes that may have taken place outside the Administrator are taken into account.

Manual Reindexing

At any time, Employees may trigger a full, manual rebuild of the search index (after bulk changes, for example). To trigger a full reindex, navigate to the Search Index Tools link in the Administrator.

Search Settings

Finally, there are numerous settings allowing Employees to turn certain search features on or off, or to control their behavior. To manage the various Search Settings, visit the Search Setting link immediately underneath the Search Index Tools link.