What is online retail merchandising? An introduction
Done any shopping on an ecommerce website lately? If so, you know a smooth online shopper experience is not optional ...
Sr. SEO Web Digital Marketing Manager
Done any shopping on an ecommerce website lately? If so, you know a smooth online shopper experience is not optional ...
Sr. SEO Web Digital Marketing Manager
It’s hard to imagine having to think about Black Friday less than 4 months out from the previous one ...
Chief Strategic Business Development Officer
What happens if an online shopper arrives on your ecommerce site and: Your navigation provides no obvious or helpful direction ...
Search and Discovery writer
In part 1 of this blog-post series, we looked at app interface design obstacles in the mobile search experience ...
Sr. SEO Web Digital Marketing Manager
In part 1 of this series on mobile UX design, we talked about how designing a successful search user experience ...
Sr. SEO Web Digital Marketing Manager
Welcome to our three-part series on creating winning search UX design for your mobile app! This post identifies developer ...
Sr. SEO Web Digital Marketing Manager
National No Code Day falls on March 11th in the United States to encourage more people to build things online ...
Consulting powerhouse McKinsey is bullish on AI. Their forecasting estimates that AI could add around 16 percent to global GDP ...
Chief Revenue Officer at Algolia
How do you sell a product when your customers can’t assess it in person: pick it up, feel what ...
Search and Discovery writer
It is clear that for online businesses and especially for Marketplaces, content discovery can be especially challenging due to the ...
Chief Product Officer
This 2-part feature dives into the transformational journey made by digital merchandising to drive positive ecommerce experiences. Part 1 ...
Director of Product Marketing, Ecommerce
A social media user is shown snapshots of people he may know based on face-recognition technology and asked if ...
Search and Discovery writer
How’s your company’s organizational knowledge holding up? In other words, if an employee were to leave, would they ...
Search and Discovery writer
Recommendations can make or break an online shopping experience. In a world full of endless choices and infinite scrolling, recommendations ...
Algolia sponsored the 2023 Ecommerce Site Search Trends report which was produced and written by Coleman Parkes Research. The report ...
Chief Strategic Business Development Officer
You think your search engine really is powered by AI? Well maybe it is… or maybe not. Here’s a ...
Chief Revenue Officer at Algolia
You looked at this scarf twice; need matching mittens? How about an expensive down vest? You watched this goofy flick ...
Sr. SEO Web Digital Marketing Manager
“I can’t find it.” Sadly, this conclusion is often still part of the modern enterprise search experience. But ...
Sr. SEO Web Digital Marketing Manager
Feb 1st 2017 product
Search is more than a query and results – search is a conversation your users have with your product. When done right, you feel understood by the engine – and, in turn, the product – which reacts to your needs and adapts to what you’re saying as you’re saying it.
Perhaps one of the most magical moments is when the search engine speaks to you – an individual person, with search results that are catered to your personal tastes and expectations.
“Personalization, yes! But not at the cost of speed.”
One of the core focuses of Algolia is speed. Every time we’ve looked at how other search engines handle personalization, it always came at the cost of speed – we don’t think personalizing the search results makes sense if it makes the search slow. Who wants a slow, personal conversation?
We rolled up our sleeves earlier this year and got to work, and we’re proud today to announce two features that make personalization of search results a breeze, without compromising on the speed Algolia is known for. We call these two API features Optional Filters and Filter scoring – and here’s how it works.
Because the feature can place high demands on CPU performance, it is enabled by default only in our Enterprise plans. If you’re interested in trying it out on your plan, send us a note.
Let’s take the example of searching through an index of movies. In this hypothetical website, users can add movies to their “Watch later” list – a familiar feature – and this information is added to the index, in the form of an attribute watch_later with an array of user IDs of every user that adds this movie.
A Sample JSON entry:
{
"movie_name": "The Karate Kid",
"genre": "Action",
"watch_later": ["user42", "user123", "user421", …]
// …
}
When we search this index, we want movies that are added to a watch list to appear before others.
A regular search would look like:
index.search("karate").then(/* … */)
With personalization, it would work like this:
// `watch_later` needs to be set as a facet in attributesForFaceting
index.search(
"karate",
{ optionalFilters: ["watch_later:user42"] }
).then(/* … */)
With only one added parameter, suddenly the results are personalized: the search retrieves all the movies related to “karate”, but if a user has added one of the movies related to “karate” to their watch list, this result will show up at the top of the results.
What if you want to have multiple layers of personalization? For example, let’s say you’ve analyzed that a user is a huge fan of Action movies, watches a lot of comedies, but is not restricted to these two genres. You’d like the results to first show Action movies, then Comedies, and then the rest of the results. Here’s how you’d do it:
// `genre` needs to be set as a facet in attributesForFaceting
index.search(
"karate",
{ optionalFilters: ["genre:Action<score=2>", ["genre:Comedy<score=1>"] }
).then(/* … */)
…And you’ll get the results in the order that you expected! We added a new rule called filters in our ranking formula, which will rank the results according to the matching optionalFilters and filters scores.
We’ve been playing around with these features for a few months now, and a few of our customers already use them in production during the beta period, with amazing results.
The best part about these features is how versatile they are: there’s virtually nothing you can’t do when it comes to personalization of results:
If you want to know more about these features, we wrote a guide on personalization. We can’t wait to see what you’ll build with them!
Powered by Algolia Recommend