Indexing

Last update: February 24, 2025

CREATED FOR:

  • Admin

The Live Search indexing process reads through the catalog for product attributes and builds an index so that products can be searched, filtered, and presented rapidly.

Product attribute properties (metadata) determine:

  • How an attribute can be used in the catalog
  • Its appearance and behavior in the store
  • The data that is included in data transfer operations

The scope of attribute metadata is website/store/store view.

The Live Search API allows a client to sort by any product attribute that has the storefront property Use in Search set to Yes in the Adobe Commerce Admin. When enabled, Search Weight can be set for the attribute.

Live Search does not index deleted products or products set to Not Visible Individually.

NOTE
Commerce customers with Live Search can take advantage of faster price changes updates and synchronization time on their websites with the SaaS price indexer.

Indexing pipeline

The client calls the search service from the storefront to retrieve (filterable, sortable) index metadata. Only searchable product attributes with the Use in Layered Navigation property set to Filterable (with results) and Use for Sorting in Product Listing set to Yes can be called by the search service.

To construct a dynamic query, the search service needs to know which attributes are searchable and their weight. Live Search honors Adobe Commerce search weights (1-10, where 10 is the highest priority). The list of data that is synced and shared with the catalog service can be found in the schema, which is defined in:

vendor/magento/module-catalog-data-exporter/etc/et_schema.xml

Live Search indexing client search diagram

  1. Check merchant for Live Search entitlement.
  2. Get store views with changes to attribute metadata.
  3. Store indexing attributes.
  4. Reindex the search index.

Full index

When Live Search is configured and synchronized during onboarding, it can take up to 60 minutes to build the initial index. Large catalogs can take longer to index. The process begins after cron submits the feed and finishes running.

The following events trigger a full sync and index build:

For example, changing the Use in Search property of the color attribute from No to Yes changes the attribute metadata to searchable=true, and triggers a full sync and reindex. The following attribute metadata trigger a full sync and reindex when changed:

  • filterableInSearch
  • searchable
  • sortable
  • visibleInSearch

Streaming product updates

After the initial index is built during onboarding, the following incremental product updates are continuously synced and reindexed:

  • New products added to the catalog
  • Changes to product attribute values

For example, adding a new swatch value to the color attribute is handled as a streaming product update.

Streaming update workflow:

  1. Updated products are synced from the Adobe Commerce instance to the catalog service.
  2. The indexing service continuously looks for product updates from the catalog service. Updated products are indexed as they arrive in the catalog service.
  3. It can take up to 15 minutes for a product update to become available in Live Search.