Search Explain

Summary

The Search Explain module enables understanding as to why search results returned in the order they did.

Search Types

Default Search is the search with its own results page, showing the grid of returned products.

Instant Search is the type-ahead search within the page header on the home page.

Search Ranking Scores

There are 3 parts to the ranking score:

Text Score - this comes from Elastic Search (the search engine), and is a score based on the search term appearing in the product documents (e.g., name, description, etc.). More technically this is using a Term Frequency - Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) score.

Popularity - this is defined as the number of sales (units) of the product in the last 14 days. (Popularity isn’t used on all sites, and if it is not used then “n/d” for “not defined” is shown).

Availability - this is a percentage definition of how available a product is:

• For simple products availability percentage is 0 or 100%
• For parent products availability percentage is available children / total children * 100

The Overall score is calculated by multiplying Text Score x Popularity Score x Availability x 0.1, rounded to 2 decimal places.

Search Redirects on Search Explain Module

If the search term has a search redirect set up, then a “similarity” value is also displayed. This shows how similar (from 0% to 100%) the default search results are to the DDL or manual list page results.

Using Search Explain Module

Enter your search term into the Keywords box as you would do on the website.

Select your Search Type and whether or not you want to consider Search Redirects within your query.

Click the Search button, and you’ll see results.

You can get more details on how the words matched by clicking on a particular row.