26. March 2025

Ecommerce Search: Contexts are evolving into experiences

Over the past months, we've been working on a significant update that transforms how you manage what was previously called contexts in Ecommerce Search. The first part of this update has now been released, renaming and expanding the previous concept of contexts into a more flexible approach called experiences. Additionally, we are introducing an entirely new concept: playgrounds.

Why the change

Previously in Search, a context included multiple settings, or effects, grouped together:

• Context conditions to identify the correct context based on a search request.
• Facets included in the response.
• Commercial parameter weights influencing sorting and ranking.
• Pinned products always shown in a specific order.
• Affinity weights controlling personalized sorting.
• Search relevance for boosting specific fields.

Creating new contexts required defining all these settings from scratch each time.

What is an experience

To simplify and streamline this, we have introduced experiences. An experience is essentially a reusable set of effects (settings). Experiences can inherit effects from other experiences and override them only as needed, simplifying setup and maintenance.

For example, you might have an experience for the Clothing category, containing facets, sorting weights, and pinned products relevant to clothing. Subcategories like T-shirts, Pants, or Shoes might previously have required separate contexts. With experiences, you can now create sub-experiences based on the Clothing experience, modifying only what's unique—like different facets for T-shirts or custom relevance boosting for Pants. Another example is a Black Friday experience that inherits from the Clothing experience. This experience might include a different set of pinned products and higher weights for commercial parameters to boost sales.

This structure significantly reduces redundancy and simplifies maintenance, making your workflow easier and more intuitive.

What is a playground

A playground is an environment where you can test and adjust your experience settings. The playground's user interface and functionality closely resemble the previous context UI, ensuring familiarity and ease of use when managing your experiences.

Here, you can immediately see how changes impact search results, making it easier to fine-tune your experiences for optimal performance. Each experience has its own playground, allowing you to experiment safely without affecting your live configuration. Once satisfied, playground settings can be saved as a new experience.