An overview of search-related features in Composable Commerce that enhance product discoverability through your storefront.
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To create performant storefront product search experiences for your customers, you can use the Product Search or Product Projection Search APIs.
They are both designed to suit a variety of product search use cases, such as product listing and category landing pages. The functionalities of both APIs are compared in Product Search versus Product Projection Search.
For full-text searches, you can also implement a basic auto-complete functionality using the Search Term Suggestions API.
Product Search versus Product Projection Search
The following comparisons can help you choose the API that best fits your needs.
Product indexing
Indexing is a process carried out by the API to build the search index for your product information, which is optimized for read access with low response times.
If you retrieve product information using the Products API or Product Projections API before indexing is complete, the product data in the search index might be different.
The search index is automatically updated whenever Products are changed.
| Functionality | Product Search | Product Projection Search |
|---|---|---|
| Indexed projection of the Products | current | current and staged |
| Support for Variant-level Attributes | variants.attributes.<attribute-name> expression, up to 50 Attributes per Product Variant | filter by Attribute values |
| Support for Product-level Attributes | attributes.<attribute-name> expression, up to 50 Attributes per Product Variant | - |
| Support for Standalone Prices | for sorting, filtering, and faceting, up to 10 000 Standalone Prices per Product | - |
| Support for validity periods of Prices | variants.prices.* keyword fields | - |
| Support for Stores | stores keyword field, up to 15 000 Stores per Product | - |
| Support for Product Selections | productSelections keyword field, up to 15 000 Product Selections per Product | - |
| Support for Product Tailoring | - | - |
Query expressions
| Functionality | Product Search | Product Projection Search |
|---|---|---|
| Full-text search | fullText expression | text.{language} query parameter |
| Fuzzy search | fuzzy expression BETA | fuzzy and fuzzyLevel query parameters |
| Exact match | exact expression | filter and filter.query query parameters |
| Range of values | range expression | {from} to {to} operator on filters |
| If field exists | exists expression | exists and missing operators on filters |
| Prefix match | prefix expression | - |
| Wildcard match | wildcard expression | - |
| Boosting particular searchable fields | boosting | - |
| Specify query expressions per searchable field | by field name | for filters, but not for full-text search |
| Operators to define compound expressions | and, or, not, filter operators | Passing multiple filter parameters in one search request combines them with an AND operator. Specifying multiple comma-separated values in one filter parameter combines them with an OR operator. |
Query result
By default, the Product Search API returns only the IDs of the matching Products. You can use the returned Product IDs to retrieve the full projection of a Product (Get Product Projection by ID).
| Functionality | Product Search | Product Projection Search |
|---|---|---|
| IDs of the matching Products | by default | embedded in the returned Product Projection |
| Full representations of the matching Products | with GraphQL | by default |
| Price selection | - | with query parameters |
| Scoped Price search | - | with query parameters |
Full-text search
| Functionality | Product Search | Product Projection Search |
|---|---|---|
| Specific to different languages | ✓ | ✓ |
| Allow to specify which Product fields should be taken into account. | ✓ | - |
Fuzzy search
| Functionality | Product Search | Product Projection Search |
|---|---|---|
| Fuzziness level adjusts to term length automatically. | ✓ | - |
| Allow to specify which Product fields should be taken into account. | ✓ | - |
Filtering
| Functionality | Product Search | Product Projection Search |
|---|---|---|
| Filter by Category, Attribute values, Product Type, and Price. | ✓ | ✓ |
Faceting
| Functionality | Product Search | Product Projection Search |
|---|---|---|
| Count all occurrences of distinct values. | distinct facets | term facets |
| Count Products that have values within a specified range. | ranges facets | range facets |
| Count the number of Products or Product Variants. | count facets | counting products parameter |
| Allow for handling missing values when calculating facets. | missing values | - |
| Specify scope of facets. | scope of facets | filter or filter.query parameters |
Sorting
| Functionality | Product Search | Product Projection Search |
|---|---|---|
| Sort order (ascending or descending) | asc and desc sort order | asc and desc sorting |
| Sort mode to specify which value to sort on when Product contains multiple values for the field | min, max, avg, sum sort mode | asc.min, asc.max, desc.min, desc.max for sorting by values on Product Variants |
| Specify exactly which resources should be considered for sorting. | sort filter | - |