Due to the lack of documentation and inadequate knowledge transfer from the client’s previous technology partner, the team had to dig into the code to reverse-engineer the customizations and components. We enhanced the Solr search experience, added new features, and completely rearchitected the search behavior control tool.
The rearchitected search behavior control tool enables the client to redirect keyword searches to the specific pages and alter the sequence of the searched items. We also developed a web module where the client can preview the search result pages. This allows the product team to experiment various search configuration parameters and enable beta and A/B testing setup. Some upgrades were as follows:
- Redesigned a feed-based single-threaded indexing process to multi-thread process using MongoDB, Kafka, and Spark Solr.
- Upgraded the existing system to support the new feature where catalog search shows products that can be bought online.
- Modified catalog search response to show results based on a customer’s browsing history. Improved default sorting behavior based on sales and pricing data. Added the ‘bestseller’ tag to the products on the search page.
- Improved typeahead to show suggestions that gave good results and incorporated spell check.
