Definition:
An Endeca application can be configured to search a variety of record properties or search interfaces in order of decreasing importance. This “cascading search” provides the best possible experience to users by presenting highly relevant results when they are available, and, if not, returning the potentially less relevant results that would otherwise have remained hidden.
For example, many product catalogs contain at least two fields that describe an item: a title field with, e.g., brown shoes and a description field of, e.g., these formal brown shoes complement navy socks.
Users searching for navy socks generally would not find this result relevant, but it’s probably better than returning nothing if there are no other matches for navy socks.
How to implement it?
- Create second search interface that contains all of the searchable fields from the original interface, plus the description field(s).
- Add application logic where search across first interface and if you get fewer than N results then search across second search interface
N can be equal to zero, or a small number like 2 or 5 or 10.
Best Practice:
1) If the data set has descriptions that contain marketing text or other copy that does not directly describe the record in question, exclude them from search if at all possible.
2) If excluding semi-relevant descriptions is not feasible or desired, implement cascading search, so that these properties are searched only when fewer than N results are returned.
3) Cascading search applications should use the MatchAll match mode on the primary interface and MatchAllPartial on the secondary (long description) interface.
An Endeca application can be configured to search a variety of record properties or search interfaces in order of decreasing importance. This “cascading search” provides the best possible experience to users by presenting highly relevant results when they are available, and, if not, returning the potentially less relevant results that would otherwise have remained hidden.
For example, many product catalogs contain at least two fields that describe an item: a title field with, e.g., brown shoes and a description field of, e.g., these formal brown shoes complement navy socks.
Users searching for navy socks generally would not find this result relevant, but it’s probably better than returning nothing if there are no other matches for navy socks.
How to implement it?
- Create second search interface that contains all of the searchable fields from the original interface, plus the description field(s).
- Add application logic where search across first interface and if you get fewer than N results then search across second search interface
N can be equal to zero, or a small number like 2 or 5 or 10.
Best Practice:
1) If the data set has descriptions that contain marketing text or other copy that does not directly describe the record in question, exclude them from search if at all possible.
2) If excluding semi-relevant descriptions is not feasible or desired, implement cascading search, so that these properties are searched only when fewer than N results are returned.
3) Cascading search applications should use the MatchAll match mode on the primary interface and MatchAllPartial on the secondary (long description) interface.
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