There are several methods to influence the relevance of the items. In the standard system, the sales figures are used to calculate the ranking in addition to the text relevance. On the one hand, Findologic offers merchandising functions with the help of which certain product groups or individual products can be ranked. On the other hand, the ranking can be influenced on the basis of the item data exported to us.
Our merchandising functions, with which the ranking can be adjusted, are:
Pushing products
Product groups, or products with a previously defined property, can be moved up the ranking. Examples could be news, stocked products, certain manufacturers, but also any other characteristic sent to us.
Product placement
For previously defined search terms, items that should always be displayed first are determined.
In order to influence the relevance using the item data, you can use the Sort and Bonus fields of the CSV/XML file.
Sort
If you use the Sort field, items with higher values get a higher relevance. The values may only contain positive numbers. If the Sort value is to be used, this must also be announced in technical support. When using the Sort fields, the sales figures are no longer used for sorting. Therefore, these must be maintained continuously.
Bonus
If you use the bonus field, this value is included in the relevance calculation. The bonus value must be a positive number. We recommend a value between 0 and 3, where 3 means the highest relevance. Bonus values can also be used in combination with Sort values. The use of bonus fields does not work in combination with the 'push products' function from the Findologic customer account.
A more detailed description of bonus/sort values can be found in the technical documentation.
In addition to the options mentioned above, there are other options for ranking, such as price, publication date and others.
Since the sorting of search results is a complex issue, we strongly recommend that you consult our search experts in this case.