Back
Step 4: Customize Search Configuration
Now it’s time to make sure your search configuration is optimized to produce the best results for your business! For this step, we will make a few changes to the backend search configuration and use the Test Search that we used in steps 2 and 3 to ensure that our changes take effect.
Let’s update the hardcoded prompts that appear in the search bar, and the synonyms.
Follow the steps below to optimize your search.
1. Navigate back to your Search Configuration.
Click Search in the navigation bar. Then, click on the name of your experience and select Experience Details.
Here, we’ll update the prompts and synonyms.
2. In the navigation bar, click Query Suggestions.
This is where you can populate the hardcoded prompts that we saw in the previous steps. We’ll start with the Universal Prompts.
The universal prompts appear as soon as a user clicks into the search bar. We recommend setting these prompts as natural questions or expressions that lead to structured answers, like “What products do you offer?” or “Learn more about careers at (your business)”.
Make these changes in your experience and click Save at the bottom right corner of your screen.
Once the experience saves successfully, use the Test Search (on the right of the screen) to ensure that your changes appear in the search bar.
3. Go to Synonyms in the navigation bar and add any common synonyms for your business.
Synonyms allow you to identify words that have the same intent and meaning for your business. There are two ways to configure synonyms:
One Way Synonyms allow you to map Phrase A to Phrase B, but not the other way around. For example, if a restaurant chain wanted to surface results referencing “pasta” anytime someone queried for “spaghetti,” they could use a one way synonym to map “pasta” -> “spaghetti” so that those relevant entities display.
The one way synonym would be: pasta -> spaghetti
Synonym Sets allow you to set up bi-directional synonyms between phrases. For example, if a healthcare company wanted ‘doctor’, ‘provider’, and ‘physician’ to all mean the same thing in their search configuration, they could set up a synonym set that essentially creates one way synonyms between all permutaions in that array (list).
The Synonym set would be: doctor <-> provider <-> physician
Add a one way synonym that is applicable for your business. An example could be: Office -> Location.
Click Save in the bottom right of your screen. Once the experience saves successfully, click back into Test Search and ensure that your changes have been applied by searching a query that will apply the synonym (in the example above, you could search “office” and expect to see your location return).
Congratulations! You’ve updated your Search Configuration.