Search & Discovery

Search is where a large catalogue either earns its keep or buries itself. The technical part — indexing, faceting, refinement — is well understood. The hard part is that relevance is a merchandising decision wearing an engineering costume, and the two teams rarely have the same vocabulary.

Work usually starts by making the current behaviour visible: what people search for, what returns nothing, and where they abandon. Only then is it worth touching the index.

Built on Oracle Endeca and Elasticsearch, fed from PIM through loaders I have written more than once.