8 Must-Haves for Modern Search Engines

A robust search engine solution forms an integral part of the overall user experience on your site. It's the core that helps customers find the items they're looking for efficiently, and marketers manage search results and tailor them to their business needs.?? ?

It seems evident that search engines should deliver relevant search results for a given query. However, not all companies still optimize their search results, which directly affects their conversion rates and revenues.?

Before jumping into the essential search engine features, let's take a moment to consider the meaning of "relevant results". It's not just about matching the keywords of the title or product description. It should also consider more specific factors, such as the product's availability or any typos or irregular queries users may use on your site.?? ?

That's why it's so important to stay one step ahead of your customers and ensure they can easily find what they need, regardless of their search habits and patterns. Synerise AI Search helps you meet all the essential requirements a modern search engine must have to build the best experience for your customers.?? ?

Here are 8 must-have search engine capabilities you'll find in Synerise.?

1. Automated indexing?

To set up AI Search, you need to use indexing, which creates a database with all the products available in your feed so that the search returns items based on that database when the customer enters a query.?? ?

With Synerise, you'll always have up-to-date indexes because they are automatically updated whenever a product feed is modified. This way, you always have access to an updated product database, showing shoppers all products, including new arrivals, saving time and money while manually updating your assortment.?? ?

2. Personalize search results?

Personalization is one of the most important aspects of making your search engine results more relevant. Our state-of-the-art personalization models allow us to provide every customer with the product they desire to find, shortening the path to conversion and enhancing their search experience.? ?

The search engine's AI personalization function will influence the order of search results, keeping them relevant to the user's query. In this way, the items not only match the query but are ordered in such a way that those that match the customer's preferences appear first.?

3. Influencing query results without requiring coding skills?

Website search is where many customers begin their journey through your site. For this reason, it is a great place where you can promote your items or groups of items to shorten the paths for them and make them more visible to customers. You can easily set up such a configuration in Synerise search rules.?

Rules allow items to be promoted based on attributes and queries. The flexibility of this solution also allows you to promote items to specific positions, influencing the behavior of the search engine to match specific business needs. You can influence the queries themselves or the results of given queries. All these settings can be made without entering a line of code.?

Check out the following use cases for possible search rule usage scenarios:

• Promoting mobile accessories in search using context rules ?
• Promoting new items when a certain phrase is searched ?
• Promoting brands and specific items with rules ?
• Handling indirect price filter in query with rules ??

4. Enriching feed for search purposes?

Unsurprisingly, your customers may refer to a product, category, or even some attributes using different names than those defined in your feed. Does this mean an emerging need to update the feed constantly? If you use a tool that allows you to enrich your feed on an ongoing basis, you don't need to make additional changes to your product descriptions. ?

This is where synonyms come to the rescue. Synerise offers a synonym management feature that allows you to customize search results so customers always get relevant search results that match their intentions. Marketers, on the other hand, have extensive opportunities to customize search results based on the behavioral patterns of individual customers.? ?

Check out this use case to see how you can create synonyms for a selected query.???

5. Managing typos and missing words?

The appearance of typos cannot be a factor that will return no result. This way, you risk driving your customers away. Fast typing can cause some typos to occur, for which your search engine should be tolerant.? ?

Synerise Handling typos and missing words function addresses this need by dealing with such issues efficiently. When a word from the query does not exist in the searchable attribute values or has a typo, the Synerise AI search engine will find the best replacement.? ?

Check out our Use Case describing the scenario of handling non-existent search phrases here .???

6. Testing different search configurations?

A/B testing is crucial for optimizing your search engine. Synerise's search configuration includes an A/B testing feature to help you determine the impact of your change on your search engine. There is no single way to perform A/B testing for search, so the configuration settings mainly depend on your needs.??

With Synerise, you can create an A/B test in minutes. Select the settings required for the test without making any changes to your existing search implementation. You can also get instant insight into the results of your A/B tests. Our built-in analytics allow you to compare variant performance in real-time.?

For example, you can refer to?this ?Use Case, which describes setting up A/B tests comparing the results of presenting search results promoting bestsellers with personalized results.?

7. Influence phrases suggested to customers?

An additional benefit to the previously discussed features can be the ability to influence the phrases suggested to customers. With the query suggestion feature available in Synerise, you can define various values on which query suggestions will be based, these can be product attributes, manually defined phrases or a deny list of phrases that will never be returned as a query suggestion.?

8. Real-time search analytics?

Your search engine is a valuable source of customer data. It allows you to learn essential information about your customers, including what products they are looking for, what wording and language they use, and so on. Access to all these insights can help you refine the customer journey, improve your communication with customers and increase conversion rates.?? ?

With Synerise AI Search Engine statistics, you have access to all the data you can think of, which can help you figure out how your products should be structured and described, aligning them with customer search behavior.?? ?

This article ?will provide more information on how these statistics are calculated.?? ?

Learn more use cases describing interesting search scenarios that you can implement in your business:?

• Abandoned Search Scenario ?
• Add linked pages to Search Engine ?
• Store location Search Engine ??

Wojciech Szumowski , AI Product Owner

Kateryna Tkachuk , Junior Product Marketing Specialist