My search configuration for restaurant locations vertical is not working properly.
For example, searching ‘Brier Creek’ results to the Links vertical when it should show the specific restaurant location. The Brier Creek restaurant location (Entity ID 28) under Restaurants Entity Type has ‘Brier Creek’ under the Geomodifier field and that field is included in the backend search configuration with nlp filter and text search. See below for picture reference.
The same thing happens with ‘Freedom Drive’. It should show up because it’s in the Geomodifier field for a Restaurant Entity Type, but it doesn’t.
Thank you for your help!
Hi Ji Young,
Welcome to the Community!
To debug location searches, I’d recommend reviewing the API response to understand why certain results (or no results) are returned. I would look at the API request specifically for the restaurants vertical search to narrow down what the algorithm is searching for. You can review this unit on looking at API requests.
In the API response above for the search “Brier Creek”, you can see 0 results were returned in the locations vertical. The appliedQueryFilters tells us an NLP filter was applied on the field builtin.location for Brier Creek Landing, Georgia, instead of Brier Creek, North Carolina like you want. Similarly, the API response for “Freedom Drive” is filtering to the location Freedom Drive, Ohio instead of Freedom Drive, North Carolina.
Recommendation 1: Since all the locations in this account are in North Carolina and South Carolina, I would recommend adding a bounding box to limit the geographic range the algorithm searches in. Since there are cities with similar names across different states as we saw above, this would greatly improve location search quality.
Recommendation 2 (opitonal): You also mentioned that you have an NLP filter on the geomodifier field. If you would prefer to have the algorithm match on geomodifier, you can set an NLP filter order to prioritize the geomodifier field over builtin.location.
- If users are familiar with the geomodifier name of locations, this could be a good way to return the one result they are looking for.
- However, note that an NLP filter here would filter to the one best match and not show any other results. The NLP filter for
builtin.location, on the other hand, would filter to a location like Brier Creek, NC and show all locations near there.
Note: Typically, we recommend starting with search logs to debug search quality, but search logs don’t give as much information on location searches specifically:
