How Products are Arranged on Search Result Pages

The order in which products are shown while searching is affected by a number of factors. Below are listed the influencers of product order from most to least influential.

To see how products are arranged on Category and other non-Search pages, check out How Products are Arranged on Category Pages.

Shopper's Sort

If a shopper on your site selects a sorting option while browsing, this will act as a hard override to everything else. When a shopper selects a sort, all other sorts, boosts, pins, etc., are ignored in favor of sorting on whatever the shopper chooses.

Tip: When the top sort is selected again ("Most Popular" in this example), the page reverts to the way it was before the shopper sort was applied.

Pinned Products

Assuming there is no shopper sort, the top priority for showing products comes from Pinned products via our Merchandising tools. These products are shown at the top in the exact order set by you in the campaign for this page.

You can see this in Search Preview by looking for the blue pin icon on products, and by looking for "Promoted" on each product while viewing in the Advanced view.

Hard Sorts (if applicable)

Hard sorts are set up on special request by Athos Commerce when there is a sort that should be more important than search relevancy itself. A common example is to push all out-of-stock items to the bottom of listings, regardless of whether they match what the shopper is looking for or not.

Tip: Hard sorts apply to all search result pages but never to category pages. If you want the hard sort to also apply to categories, you will need to make the top global boost rule the same as the hard sort.

You can see this in Search Preview by looking for "Hard Sorts" on each product.

Relevancy

Once hard merchandising and behavioral boosting are accounted for (above), products are arranged by their Search Relevancy score, which always occurs on searches.

In Search Preview, you can see why some products score higher than others by looking at the Search Logic section within each product card while in the Advanced view. You can also click "View details" to find where your search terms matched in the product data.

View Details

Click "View Details" in any product card to see more information about the selected product. At the bottom of the pop-up window, you will see a new field, originTimestamp, which will display the last updated time and date for this product.

Product Boost Rules

Each tiered group of products from relevancy is then affected by Product Boost Rules. These rules, set by you in our Merchandising tools, allow the dynamic re-ordering of products based on specific rules per your product data.

You can see this in the campaign editor by looking at boosts on each product.. Boosts higher in the list are more important, and a boost showing lower is always a tie-breaker for the rule above it.

You can also view the boost rules and where they come from in the Boost Rules toolbox.

Default Sort

First, tie-breaker rules configured in the campaign's Boost Rules are applied. Then, the final tie-breaker for deciding how to sort products is the default sort option, which is the top field sort configured on the Sorting page. You can see an example of how these rules apply in Search Preview in the Sources toolbox under the Sorts section.

In the example above, you can see that a campaign tie-breaker rule for "best_seller" is set in the default (global) campaign. Now in Search Preview, go to the Sources toolbox to see the field from your default sort. 

If you have things like boost rules set up, this usually won't make much of a change on your site. However in cases where there are no pinned products, boost rules, or hard sorts, there will be plenty of tied products in search relevancy that could use a helpful default sort order.