It's easy to tune search in a way that improves your results but it can also have unintended consequences. When changing search settings it's good to work slowly. Make a change, test it, and keep it for a while before making more changes.
We have our Best Practice Checklist that we'd highly recommend you review! There are lots of ways to influence search and this gives you a way to tune in a positive way.
Guide to Search Tools
This is our top level guide but you can find more about each topic in the titled sections below.
Make changes slowly, test them, let them sit for a while to see the affect for users before making more changes.
Popularity Boost — Use our popularity score to boost products in search or enable sort.
Automatic value based on store add-to-cart records
Global Container Search Priority – In your Catalog Container avoid setting all of your catalogs to different Search Priorities. It works best when you use the same value within only a few groupings (two groups is ideal). Assume you have 6 managed catalogs in your global catalog container and you think of them in two groups, four of your catalogs are the high priority ones and two the low priority ones. When setting Catalog container Search Priorities use value 1 for all of your high priority catalogs and priority 2 for all of your low priority catalogs (or set them all to 1 if they are equal). Catalogs→Catalog Containers→Catalog Assignment
Item Priority – Set item priority sparingly. We recommend no more than one or two products have an item priority set per category. The affect pushes these items to the top so your best seller can appear first. Use a setting of 1 as an example. These can be imported or set using the admin.
Product Sort Setting – This sets the default sort when a category or search results loads. We recommend "Relevance" in most cases.
Sort by Relevance 👍 — this orders items based on the combination of terms searched and popularity boost, if configured.
Sort by Popularity — this is not recommended as default since it sorts only by the popularity score.
How Search Works
Items to Display
Check for Customer Alias and Search Assist — if an exact match is found, it's substituted
Product Availability — checks the product records for active status, active dates, and visibility status (visible, hidden, private)
Catalog Container Visibility Rules — determines items to display and removes duplicates
If configured, also removes deactivated brands and zero cost items.
Order to Display
Distributor Sort — Dealer can control the sort of items returned
Order by In-stock Items first — if Prioritise in stock items enable then items are grouped by in-stock, then out-of-stock
Order by Product Priority — items by item priority, if enabled, are promoted first
Order by Container Search Priority — Keeps the search order the same but groups the results by the search priority in the display, starting with the lowest priority integer.
Order by brand priority — if brand priority is selected
Product listed in ordered of Relevance Score — items returned by the search engine are in order of the relevance score (including key words found and popularity as described above).
User Sort — User can override the order of items in the display by selecting a sort order other than relevance.