Understand indexing

The Indexing page provides access to the search indexes, their status, and options to perform a Quick (Partial) Rebuild or Full Rebuild for products. A quick rebuild updates product records that have changed at the base level, not including changes to the product's child items, such as category or attribute assignments. A full rebuild re-indexes all products and their child items.

You can access this page by going to Marketing > Search > Indexing.

There are several types of search indexing within Configured Commerce:

Rebuilding an index is necessary whenever you make changes changes to a respective content area. Modifying product records often requires rebuilding the Product Search Index. Changes to products or child objects (categories, attributes, and so on) display on the website correctly without a re-index because they are loaded even after a search. However, users cannot see new changes until they are indexed. Changes from adding or removing a product from a category or an attribute only appear once they have been indexed. 

You should also consider the amount of time it takes to complete a rebuild. A full rebuild takes more time to run, but a quick rebuild takes less time. You can flag products whose child objects are modified frequently with Schedule for Quick Indexing. The quick rebuild will always include these products, even if the base product is not updated. Go to the product > More Options > Schedule for Quick Indexing.

The Admin Console provides status notifications during a rebuild. These notifications appear on the Indexing page and below the Breadcrumb in the Admin Console, so you can continue working outside the Indexing page. The Indexing page notifications provide the indexing status and a link to the Index Job. The date line of the notification serves as the link to the related job history. The Job page gives important information about the job, which can be helpful for troubleshooting.

Enable Force Merge improves the search results returned when customers re-run the same query multiple times or page through search results, preventing different results from displaying each time they run the same search. This setting adds a Flush and Force Merge function at the end of the full and partial index rebuild to gather the search results. This setting is enabled by default, but you can use the following steps to disable it:

In rare cases where two or more products in a search have the same score or short description that results in a tie in sorting priorities, enable this setting to use the product number as a tiebreaker.