Catalog Search Introduction
Elastic Path Catalog Search provides fast, relevant product search capabilities for your published catalogs. Catalog Search enables shoppers to find products quickly using full-text search, filtering, faceting, and sorting, while giving merchandisers powerful tools to customize search relevance and ranking.
You can integrate Catalog Search into your storefront using the Catalog Search API or manage search settings through Commerce Manager.
How Catalog Search Works
Catalog Search works alongside your Product Experience Manager catalogs to provide optimized search functionality.
When creating or updating a catalog, enable search to allow the catalog's products to be indexed. See Catalogs. Then when a search-enabled catalog is published, the products are automatically indexed for search. The search index contains product data optimized for fast querying.
Use the Search API to query products with full-text search, filtering, faceting, and sorting. The results of the search contain the full product information, not just the indexed fields, reducing the need for further API calls.
Key Capabilities
- Full-text search: Search across product names, descriptions, SKUs, and custom fields with typo tolerance and relevance ranking
- Filtering: Narrow results using conditions on product attributes, categories, prices, and custom fields
- Faceting: Get aggregated counts for attribute values to build dynamic navigation and refinement options
- Sorting: Order results by price, name, custom fields, or relevance score
- Search Profiles: Configure search behavior including field weights, filters, and boost rules without code changes
- Custom Fields: Extend the search schema with your own product attributes for filtering, faceting, and sorting
- Fully Hydrated Responses: Search results contain complete information about the products, reducing the requirement for follow-up API calls.
Personalized Search Results
Search results are automatically personalized based on the shopper's context. The system determines which catalog and prices to show based on:
- Channel: The shopping experience, such as a web storefront or mobile app
- Account: For B2B scenarios, the shopper's account and any parent accounts
- Customer: The logged-in customer's segment or tier
- Tags: Custom context tags for advanced segmentation scenarios
See Characteristics of Shopper Catalogs for more information.
Search Profiles
Search Profiles give merchandisers control over search behavior without requiring code changes. With Search Profiles, you can:
- Configure field weights: Control which product fields are most important for relevance ranking
- Apply default filters: Enforce business rules like only showing live products
- Boost products: Promote featured products, specific brands, or categories to the top of results
- A/B test: Create multiple profiles to test different search configurations
See Search Profiles for more information.
Extending the Search Schema
By default, the search index includes standard product fields like name, description, SKU, and categories. You can extend the schema by adding custom fields from your product extensions using Indexable Fields.
This allows you to:
- Search on custom product attributes like brand, material, or specifications
- Filter products by custom fields like color, size, or rating
- Display facets for custom field values in your navigation
- Sort results by custom numeric fields like rating or popularity
See Indexable Fields for more information.
Authentication
- HTTP: Bearer Auth
Security Scheme Type: | http |
|---|---|
HTTP Authorization Scheme: | bearer |