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Search Functionality Overview

Search Functionality Overview

The Elastic Path Search Server processes search requests from the storefront and the Commerce Manager. Search Server uses the capabilities of Solr, which is an open source search platform built on Apache Lucene™ that provides scalable indexing, searching, and faceting. Solr provides faceted API responses for search queries. With these capabilities, the Search Server indexes searchable entities, such as categories, customers, products, and SKUs. For more information about Search Server technologies, see the Search Server section.

Elastic Path supports two types of search operations:
  • Keywords search without facets: Searches for the keywords and returns all results matching the keywords. All SKUs associated with a product are listed as separate products in the search result. The shopper must navigate through the results until the required item is found. The keywords search does not provide facets to refine the search result.
  • Faceted offer search: Groups similar SKUs and returns offers with SKUs. The shopper can view all variants grouped at an offer level in search results page. The faceted offer search result consists of the available facets to refine the search result to view the exact match for the query. For example, a shopper can view only the blue shirts in small size from all brands by selecting small in size and blue in color facets.
Cortex sends the search keywords for offers search and keywords search to the search server for processing and the search server returns the results to Cortex. The storefront retrieves the results from the API for shoppers to view. The Figure 1 illustrates this workflow.

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