Keyword Redirects - Endeca Best Practices

Use keyword redirects to drive users who are searching on common self-service terms to the appropriate pages, rather than searching the data set for related entries.

Ex: https://www.shopmyexchange.com

It Redirect a user who searches on shipping to the Shipping and Delivery page instead of returning catalog results with that term in the title

Thesaurus - Endeca Best Practices

1) Examine search reports regularly
2) Both most popular search terms and most commonly failed searches should be used as sources for thesaurus entries

When not to create Thesaurus entries:
a) Spelling correction
b) One-way subsets of words, e.g., Elvis to Elvis Presley
c) Plurals
d) Word breaks, e.g., Firefly to Fire fly
e) Capitalization
f) Special characters like & or $

Auto-Correction / Spell Correction - Endeca Best Practices

1) Applications should present feedback and clarification to users about spelling corrections

 

2) The MDEX Engine flag --spell-glom should be used to enable cross-field spell correction. This will enlarge the dynamic spelling dictionary created by the engine by including entries across different properties or dimensions.

Endeca Stop Words - Endeca Best Practices

Regularly review the current stop word list and reconcile it against the most popular searches. 

Remove as stop words any terms that are searched on regularly, or set those terms as keyword redirects to useful overview pages.

A list of potentially useful stop words: a, an, the, how, do, I, me, and, no or, when, where, why, are, is, you, have, it, from, over, under

What is Endeca Precedence Rules? - Endeca Features

Precedence rules provide a way to delay the display of dimensions until they offer a useful refinement of the navigation state. Precedence rules are defined in terms of a trigger dimension value and a target dimension, where a user's selection of the trigger dimension value reveals the previously unavailable target dimension to the user.
Example: Assume we have two dimensions: Size Type and Size.

We have one precedence rules:   Size Type> Size

In this case, the Size dimension is displayed after a dimension value from Size Type dimension is selected.

Option	Description
Source dimension value	The dimension that serves as a trigger for the To (or target) dimension value to be displayed.
Target dimension	The dimension that serves as a target for the From (or source) dimension value.
Rule type	There are two types of source dimension values: The standard type means that if the dimension value specified as the trigger or any of its descendants are in the navigation state, then the target is presented (one trigger, one target). The leaf type means that querying any leaf dimension value from the trigger dimension will cause the target dimension value to be displayed (many triggers, one target).

 

Stemming and Thesaurus - Endeca Features

Stemming  - The stemming dictionary is based on the common English dictionary, and doesn’t pluralize proper nouns, brand names, etc.  In order to ‘Stem’ a plural of a word that doesn’t occur commonly, a two way thesaurus entry should be made in the Workbench or update the stemming dictionary.

      Stemming  dictionary found at MDEX level /opt/app/endeca//MDEX/6.5.1/conf/stemming

    Thesaurus  -  The thesaurus is intended for specifying concept-level mappings between words and phrases.

There are two options available when configuring thesaurus entries:

1)      One-Way - This mapping technique specifies only one direction of equivalence. 

                 Ex: Assume you define a one-way mapping from the phrase “red wine” to the phrases “merlot” and “cabernet sauvignon”.  This one-way mapping ensures that a search for “red wine” also returns any matches containing the more specific terms “merlot” or “cabernet sauvignon.”

2)      Two-Way - This technique means that the direction of a word mapping is equivalent between the words.

                  Ex: a Two-way mapping between “laptop,” “desktop,” and “notebook” means that a search for one of these words will always return all results matching any of these words

Note: Only one global thesaurus is supported for an Endeca data domain. In other words, language-specific thesauruses are not supported (for example, one thesaurus for English, a second for French, and so on).  

Endeca - Stop words

Endeca Stop words
Stop words are words that are ignored by the MDEX Engine when the words are part of a keyword search.

Where I can find OOTB Stop words?
Endeca 3.1.X
/opt/apps/endeca/apps/CRS/config/CRS.stop_words.xml
Endeca 11.X
/opt/app/endeca/apps/CRS/config/mdex/CRS.stop_words.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="no" ?>
<!DOCTYPE STOP_WORDS SYSTEM "stop_words.dtd">
<STOP_WORDS>
  <STOP_WORD>a</STOP_WORD>
  <STOP_WORD>do</STOP_WORD>
  <STOP_WORD>me</STOP_WORD>
  <STOP_WORD>when</STOP_WORD>
  <STOP_WORD>about</STOP_WORD>
  <STOP_WORD>find</STOP_WORD> 
 <STOP_WORD>not</STOP_WORD>
  <STOP_WORD>where</STOP_WORD>
  <STOP_WORD>above</STOP_WORD>
  <STOP_WORD>for</STOP_WORD>
  <STOP_WORD>or</STOP_WORD>
  <STOP_WORD>why</STOP_WORD>
  <STOP_WORD>an</STOP_WORD>
  <STOP_WORD>from</STOP_WORD>
  <STOP_WORD>over</STOP_WORD>
  <STOP_WORD>with</STOP_WORD>
  <STOP_WORD>and</STOP_WORD>
  <STOP_WORD>have</STOP_WORD>
  <STOP_WORD>show</STOP_WORD>
  <STOP_WORD>you</STOP_WORD>
  <STOP_WORD>any</STOP_WORD>
  <STOP_WORD>how</STOP_WORD>
  <STOP_WORD>the</STOP_WORD>
  <STOP_WORD>your</STOP_WORD>
  <STOP_WORD>are</STOP_WORD>
  <STOP_WORD>I</STOP_WORD>
  <STOP_WORD>under</STOP_WORD>
  <STOP_WORD>can</STOP_WORD>
  <STOP_WORD>is</STOP_WORD>
  <STOP_WORD>what</STOP_WORD>
</STOP_WORDS>

 You can add application specific stop words in above mentioned file and run Endeca baseline update.