Content

Content is a part of many ecommerce solutions. Content pages can be used for product guides, delivery options, store opening hours, and much more. Including these pages as potential search results is an important part of the excellent unified search experience.

In Ecommerce Search, content pages are modelled as a hierarchical set of texts, with the text type determining the search relevance of that text, see searchable content.

Content fields

Content pages contain various different fields:

• ContentId is id of the content page.
• Name is the name of the content.
• ShortDescription contains a short description of the content page.
• Path contains the relative URL or path to the content.
• SearchableContent contains the searchable text for the content page.
• Attributes contain attributes used for searching, facets, domain filters, and relevance boosting.
• Metadata contains metadata for a content page.
• Media contains media data for the content page.
• AlternativeIds contains alternative searchable content ids.
• ActiveFromUtc specifies when a content page is active from.
• ActiveToUtc specifies when a content page is active to.

Searchable Content

Searchable content is the text on a page that should be searchable in Ecommerce Search.

To model the search relevance of a content page, the different searchable content texts are divided after the text type, determining their importance, and therefore relevance boost. The following searchable content types are included:

• heading1 is a heading at level 1
• heading2 is a heading at level 2
• heading3 is a heading at level 3
• heading4 is a heading at level 4
• heading5 is a heading at level 5
• paragraph is regular text
• link is the link text
• mediadescription is text attached to the piece of media

Attributes

Attributes can be added to content pages depending on customer needs.

Metadata

As with products, content can contain metadata for data which is required for the content page but should not be searchable.

Refer to the product metadata to see examples of how metadata fields can be used.

Media

The media field is useful for adding images, files, videos or some other media to the content page. A typical media entry could be an image relevant to the content page. Ecommerce Search does not store the actual image/file/video. Instead, it stores a link to it, together with some metadata. It is recommended to use the DAM for storing the media files. The metadata field can be used to supply relevant information about the image, like its retina version or resolution.

Content page field search relevance

The search relevance of each content field is determined by the type of that field. Below is the full list of content fields with their search relevance:

• Importance level 1
  • name
  • heading1
• Importance level 2
  • heading2
• Importance level 3
  • heading3
  • mediadescription
• Importance level 4
  • shortdescription
  • heading4
  • paragraph

Alternative ids

alternativeIds can be used to make a content page filterable on specific ids. This is useful if an external system contains an internal id and has to integrate with Ecommerce Search. If the pages are ingested with alternative ids, the external id can then be used in content page searches and exports.

Alternative ids can also be used to reference other entities inside Ecommerce Search. If, e.g., a product has a tutorial page or appears in a comparison article, the product's id can be added to the alternative ids of those content pages. Searching with the product's id as a searchIds filter, then retrieves all the content pages concerning that product as well.

Active From UTC

activeFromUtc specifies when the content page becomes active in the system. Before this date, it cannot be searched for. This allows the ingestion of content pages before they are released.

Active To UTC

activeToUtc specifies the end date of the content page in the system. After this date, the content page is no longer searchable.