Machine learning for search

Commerce can identify popular products associated with popular searches based on a number of factors, including shopper behavior and purchasing history, trend analysis, and view data, and automatically generate a corresponding set of ranking rules that boost these products in the related search results.

The machine-learning feature works in conjunction with dynamic curation and search relevancy. Manually-boosted products take precedence, followed by products identified by machine learning, with all remaining products ordered by relevancy and dynamic-curation criteria.

This feature affects only keyword search results and any subsequent navigation. It does not affect pages that contain only navigation results.

Understand auto-generated ranking rules

When the feature is enabled, Commerce periodically uploads the auto-generated popular products ranking rules to the /system/rankingRules endpoint under internal-keywords. You can view the auto-generated ranking rules by querying the following endpoint:

GET /gsadmin/v1/cloud/content/system/rankingRules/internal-keywords

Important: Do not attempt to modify the internal-keywords auto-generated ranking rules. Commerce will overwrite your changes.

The auto-generated popular products ranking rules take effect in your production environment whenever changes are published.

Only Boost/bury rules have higher precedence than the auto-generated popular products ranking rules. Popular products ranking rules take precedence over the default Relevancy ranking, Dynamic Curation, and static ranking rules.

Enable auto-generated popular products ranking rules

To enable this feature, you must use the Admin API:

  1. Run GET /gsadmin/v1/cloud/configuration/services/internal-keywords.
  2. If boostDisabled is present in the response and set to true, then set it to false.
  3. Issue a PUT command to /gsadmin/v1/cloud/configuration/services/internal-keywords to save your modifications.

Changes will take affect once the overnight process has run.

Disable auto-generated popular products ranking rules

To disable this feature, you must use the Admin API:

  1. Run GET /gsadmin/v1/cloud/configuration/services/internal-keywords.
  2. If boostDisabled is present in the response and set to false, then add it if necessary and set it to true.
  3. Issue a PUT command to /gsadmin/v1/cloud/configuration/services/internal-keywords to save your modifications.
  4. Issue a DELETE command to /gsadmin/v1/cloud/content/system/rankingRules/internal-keywords to delete previous rules.

Changes will take affect once the overnight process has run.

Identify Promoted Products

To identify when products have been promoted, you can access your site using the Preview environment and inspect the underlying ccstore/v1/search endpoint call. Each promoted product includes an additional property of DGraph.RankLabel.bstratify.merch.