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.
Setup Organic Search Results
This is a great place to start. The following settings will ensure you are using an organic search strategy. From there, you can use our Best Practice Steps to decide what to do if you want to manipulate search with a specific strategy. You can also return to this organic setup anytime you get lost and need to reset your search strategy.
Store and Container Settings for Organic Search
While many other settings can effect search, the following settings will help users find the most relevant products based on their search terms and the product content.
Catalog Container Settings:
Go to EvolutionX Admin → Catalogs → Catalog Containers
Edit each container which you want to affect (e.g., your global container).
Set the catalog search priorities to zero for all catalogs. Note that the catalog priorities can remain as they are; only the search priorities should be set to zero. This change ensures that search results are not regrouped or changed based on their catalog alone.
Store Settings:
Go to EvolutionX Admin → Store Settings → Store Preferences → Products tab.
Set the Product Search Sort to "Relevance Only". This setting is necessary to return organic search results, as other settings may reorder the results based on different criteria, preventing the most relevant products by search term and content from appearing first.
Reset Storefront Search Cache:
Go to EvolutionX Admin → Store Settings → Product Search and click save to reset the search cache. Note that some settings take a few minutes to reindex so this step may have to be repeated later and another test performed.
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 – If enabled in Store Preferences, the items in the result will first be ordered using the item priority value and the remaining are based on relavance (by search score). Read more here about setting Item Priority and how it works.
Product Search Sort – In the Admin→Settings→Store Preferences→Product Display you will find the Product Category Sort and Product Search Sort settings. This sets the default sort when a category or search results loads.
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 results and Category views 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 (Search pages and Category pages)
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 (Used for Search only, not category views)— 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.
Search Logic and Steps
EvolutionX Search Processing Steps
User enters a search term e.g. "red pen"
Customer product alias codes ( if they exist )
Exact match only
We look for a matching Search Assists
Match on the most specific
We find the longest search assist term that is found within the search term and then return the associated alias.
We query the full index with the following
We query using search assist alias, customer product alias codes, or just the search term.
Apply Store Search recipe when querying the full index.
Popularity boost will influence the recipe and thus the results returned
We take the first 1,500 results from the above steps and we scrub them based on the following.
Rules :
Deduplicate based on Catalog priority within the catalog container
We deduplicate products between catalogs by one of the following SKU, Product ID, or Manufacturer ID
We ignore priorities "0"
We apply rules (e.g. Inclusion or exclusion)
We Group items based on "Container Search Priority" group numbers
Brand deactivation removes items from the results
Group items by In stock or Out of stock (if prioritise in-stock is set)
We split the records into 2 batches, in stock vs out of stock and then apply your chosen Product Search Sort setting (e.g. relevance or brand priority, or item priority, etc) separately within each group.
We apply Product Search Sort / Category Product Sort (e.g. relevance, brand priority, product priority, etc)
We only apply the one selected. For example, if you have brand priority selected then we sort the results with brand priority first and not popularity.
Apply Product Visibility rules
Finally, return results to the customer.