Configure search

Optimizely Configured Commerce uses Elasticsearch, which provides many search capabilities for your website. You configure these search capabilities through the Admin Console to tune your search results.

There are three search versions: Commerce Search v1 (Elasticsearch version 5.5), Commerce Search v2 (Elasticsearch v7.10), and Commerce Search v3 (beta).

Configured Commerce defaults to Commerce Search v2, which you can change in the search settings. Switching between versions applies default search index settings and requires a full rebuild of the search index. The search provider is down until the index build is completed.

Configured Commerce provides a range of search settings you can use to tune your site's search results. Go to Administration > Settings in the Admin Console. See Search settings.

Stopwords in search results are common words often ignored by search engines during indexing and querying. These are words that appear often and carry minimal semantic weight on their own. For example, common stopwords include and, the, and or. Commerce Search eliminates common stopwords by default, but you can add industry-specific words or adjectives like cheap. Stopwords affect all websites.

See Work with stopwords for Commerce Search v1 and v2. See Commerce Search v3 controls for v3.

Synonyms in search results are alternate terms that have similar or equivalent meanings and are used to improve search relevance and recall. When a user searches for a word, the search engine considers its synonyms to find more matches, even if the exact word is not used in the content.

Use synonyms to link words together, with one-way or bidirectional single-word connections. For example, television would only expand from tv if you used one-way connections. For bidirectional, tv and television are interchangeable. Synonyms affect all websites.

See Work with synonyms for Commerce Search v1 and v2. See Commerce Search v3 controls for v3.

Search term redirects let you specify search terms that automatically redirect to a given internal or external URL when searched. For example, redirect the search term customer portal to the website's sign-in page. Configure these redirects for all or specific websites.

See Search term redirects for Commerce Search v1 and v2. See Commerce Search v3 controls for v3.

Boosting and burying in search results is manually or programmatically influencing the ranking of specific items in a search results list. They help ensure that certain results display higher (boosted) or lower (buried) than they normally would.

Boosting increases the visibility or rank of a search result. For example, you could highlight high-value products or promote seasonal content. If a user searched for rolling toolboxes, you could highlight a new collection.

Burying lowers the rank of a search result. For example, you could avoid showing out-of-stock items or push down low-rated content. If a user searched for office chairs, you could bury products with poor reviews.

See Boost and bury search results for Commerce Search v1 and v2. See Commerce Search v3 controls for v3. 

Partial match is when a search query retrieves results that contain only part of the keywords or phrases entered. The results may include entries where only some of the search terms appear or where the terms appear in different order.

You can configure partial match using the Minimum Match Count and Minimum Match Percent settings in the Admin Console. Determine whether a set number of words or a percentage of words in the description must match for the result to display. For example, if you set the Minimum Match Count to three and Minimum Match Percent to 75%, and a query has four terms, at least three must match, so the returned results must include the least or second-least frequent terms. These settings contribute to the number and search quality of the returned search results but do not impact scoring. See Search settings.

Fuzzy search is a search technique that finds matches even when users misspell terms. You can use the Fuzzy Search, Max Edits, and Prefix Length settings to determine how to match a word. Calibrate misspellings to determine the number of identical characters needed to match a word and how many errors a word can have before the word no longer displays in search results. See Search settings.

Users within each browser session may be shown their last ten searches before they start typing in the search bar if the setting Search History Limit is greater than 0. You can customize the number of past searches per website. See Search settings.

Commerce Search has a stemming algorithm that provides more forgiving query results. Stemming lets search enginers match variations of a word to a common base form, which gives customers more success in finding what they are looking for without entering the exact word forms in a search query.

Autocorrect in Commerce Search automatically detects and fixes common spelling mistakes, typos, or formatting errors in a user's search query before it processes the search.

The "Did you mean" feature offers a suggested alternative when a search query returns no results, poorly matched results, or contains likely misspellings or uncommon phrases.

You can turn these features on or off in the Admin Console. See Search settings.

Autocomplete in Commerce Search predicts and suggests possible completions to a user's query as they type. They can see immediate results for products, categories, content, news summary, and news content. You can configure autocomplete per website. See Search settings.

Users can filter search results, narrowing the number of results shown. Keep adding search filters on top of previous ones to narrow the results. See Filter and search within results.

Enable the Search Non-Alphanumeric Characters setting to include non-alphanumeric characters in search results. This setting preserves non-alphanumeric characters and uses whitespace to split words. When disabled, non-alphanumeric characters are ignored. Additionally, the ERPNumber and Manufacturer Part Number fields each have an entry in the search index that removes special characters and does not replace them with a space, regardless of this setting. This is useful when working with hyphenated product numbers so that the hyphen is not converted to a space. See Search settings.