Search basics
Outline
Welcome
In this module, you will be introduced to search functions and their importance to your ecommerce business.
After completing this module, you should be able to:
Locate and explore the search options within the user interface.
Explain the benefits of enabling full search capabilities to enhance search functionality.
Define synonyms and stopwords, and explain how they impact search results.
Utilize search settings to optimize and refine autocomplete suggestions.
Identify when it is necessary to rebuild search indexes to maintain performance.
Locate the rebuild functionality for search indexes and describe how to use it effectively.
What is Search?
The Optimizely Configured Commerce leverages Elasticsearch as the default search engine to provide robust search capabilities. You configure these capabilities through the Admin Console.
To learn more about search read this article:
Configure search
The Optimizely Configured Commerce search provider is Elasticsearch, which provides many search capabilities for your website. You configure these search capabilities through the Admin Console to t...
Storefront View
Customers can search for terms and view autocomplete results.
Customers can also search within results.
How do I benefit from using Search?
Everyone inside and outside your organization benefits from full search capabilities: you want your internal partners servicing the site and your external customers buying from it to find exactly what they want as quickly as possible.
You also want the ability to organize your search results to promote specific products or services, so they will appear for your customers without any work on their part, or to hide them so that customers won't see something irrelevant at the top of their search results.
The search features in Configured Commerce allow you to do all of these things and more - if you know how to work with them correctly.
Remember, search is not magical. It will not always know exactly what your customers want and need, but with a little tweaking, you can customize it to be as close to the intended results as possible.
Create synonyms
We'll use the bubbler scenario to help provide context for the instructions below. The goal is to make sure when a customer searches for any of those variants of bubbler, they all are returned in the search results.
Read the article below to learn how to Create synonyms in Configured Commerce.
Configured Commerce
Synonyms
Describes how to create synonyms in Optimizely Configured Commerce .
Work with stopwords
Step 1: Manually add stopwords. Click Optimizely Support for a few simple instructions.
Step 2: Now that you manually added stopwords, let's manually remove some or all. Click on the Optimizely Support article and follow the steps.
Step 3: Begin by importing or exporting stopwords. Click the link Optimizely Support and follow the steps.
Work with stopwords
Stopwords are the common words in language that are ignored when included within a search query. Configured Commerce has a default set of stopwords already included, but it may be useful to add add...
Search autocomplete
Click on Autocomplete in the Optimizely Support Help documentation for more information. Using your sandbox, follow these steps to find the desired settings.
- Navigate to the Admin Console > Administration > System > Settings.
- In the search box, enter the Setting name and select it from the list.
- Update the Setting as necessary.
Search autocomplete
When searching for products on a website, entering a minimum of three characters into the search field will trigger the autocomplete functionality. As more characters are entered, the search result...
Try it
It’s time to play in the Configured Commerce sandbox!
The following practice exercises take place in the Knowledge & Learning training site. Before jumping in, please log in to the Training site using the following credentials:
- Username: TrainingUser
- Password: Opticon1!#
After logging in, do the following:
- Create synonyms.
- Add, remove ad export stopwords.
- Search autocomplete.
Wrap up
Congratulations! You have completed the module. You should now be able to:
Locate and explore the search options within the user interface.
Explain the benefits of enabling full search capabilities to enhance search functionality.
Define synonyms and stopwords, and explain how they impact search results.
Utilize search settings to optimize and refine autocomplete suggestions.
Identify when it is necessary to rebuild search indexes to maintain performance.
Locate the rebuild functionality for search indexes and describe how to use it effectively.
Learn more
For the most up-to-date information, visit Search overview in the Optimizely Support Help Center.
For a complete list of resources, visit Configured Commerce resources in Optimizely Academy.