1. Search

New features for premium search

Since introducing Elasticsearch-powered Premium Search for products, we've made significant improvements based on implementation feedback and performance monitoring.

Premium search for admin endpoints

The Premium Search engine now powers both v1/me/products (buyer experience) and v1/products (admin experience). For detailed features, review the original Premium Search article.

Rollout schedule:

  1. New organizations enabled by default (since February 2020)
  2. Selected clients/partners transitioned individually
  3. Test/Dev organizations transitioned (April 3, 2020)
  4. All remaining organizations transitioned (April 20, 2020)
  5. Remove Product xp indexes and disable new index creation*

*Premium Search automatically enables searching, sorting, and filtering for all xp fields.

Important behavioral note

While API specifications remain unchanged, cached data behavior requires attention:

  • Write operations (POST/PUT/PATCH) return fresh, consistent data
  • GET operations may return cached data
  • Immediate GET after write may return stale data

Organizations created after February 12, 2020 already have these behaviors enabled.

New searchType parameter

To provide more control over search results, we've introduced the searchType parameter:

TypeDescription
AnyTermDefault. Any search word must appear in any searchable field
AllTermsAnyFieldAll search words must appear across searchable fields
AllTermsSameFieldAll search words must appear in the same searchable field
ExactPhraseExact phrase match (case insensitive) in any searchable field
ExactPhrasePrefixLike ExactPhrase, but allows incomplete last word (ideal for type-ahead)

The parameter is available on:

  • v1/products
  • v1/me/products

Usage recommendations

Consider these search behavior principles:

  • Result ranking remains consistent across search types
  • Exact phrase matches rank higher than individual terms
  • More term matches rank higher than fewer
  • ID and Name matches rank higher than Description
  • Users rarely explore beyond first page of well-ranked results
  • Overly restrictive searches may hide relevant results
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