Enhanced Lookups

What are Enhanced Lookups?

The Enhanced Lookups feature works over the default Lookups to find products more precisely using part numbers or product codes entered in the search query, even with variations in formatting.

For example, if a user searches for a part number “LMF201XT”, they get all products containing parts with the actual part number “LMF-201-(XT)”.

Specific product fields (attributes) in your catalog feed can be configured to be considered for Enhanced Lookup searches.

Business benefits

• User-friendly search: Users generally search for part numbers or product codes using spaces, dashes, or extra symbols, as it can be tedious to type in or remember the exact code. Enhanced Lookups ensure that these small variations return precise results, improving recall.
• For catalog-heavy customers: This feature is especially beneficial in verticals like automotive, industrial supplies, and B2B retail, where part numbers are commonly searched.

How Enhanced Lookups work (Recall)

Enhanced Lookups relax the exact match recall criterion of Lookups. This relaxed recall behavior is achieved as follows:

1. Normalize feed data

The values of the fields that are configured for Enhanced Lookups are normalized for all products. This step removes all non-alphanumeric characters (all characters other than A-Z, a-z, and 0-9).

For example:

• Lookup field value Abc-123 in the feed is normalized to Abc123
• Lookup field value abc 123#56-(xyz) in the feed is normalized to abc12356xyz

2. Normalize user query

The search query entered by a user is also normalized to remove all non-alphanumeric special characters, as is done for feed data values.

3. Recall products

A product is added to the recall if any one of the following conditions (with an example) is true:

• The exact user query matches any of the original (before normalization) Lookup field values.
  • Exact user query LMF-200 matches the original field value LMF-200
• The exact user query matches any of the normalized Lookup field values.
  • Exact user query LMF200 matches with the normalized value, LMF200, of the original field value LMF-200
• The normalized user query matches any of the original Lookup field values.
  • User query LMF 200 was normalized to LMF200, and matches the original field value LMF200
• The normalized user query matches any of the normalized Lookup field values.
  • User query LMF 200(J) was normalized to LMF200J and matches the normalized field value from the original value LMF-200#J

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Note

Enhanced Lookup matches are case-insensitive. This means that a normalized search query lmf200 would also match with LMF200 or Lmf200.

How to enable Enhanced Lookups?

The Enhanced Lookups feature is enabled and configured by Bloomreach.

New customers: If you are currently integrating the Bloomreach Search module, speak with your assigned Technical Services representative to set up and enable Enhanced Lookups along with Lookups.

Existing customers using Lookups: Follow the same procedure to enable Lookups and provide the required details.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. What is the impact on my existing Lookups?

Enhanced Lookups work on top of your existing Lookups configuration, and the exact matches from Lookups continue to work as before.

2. What can be the variations in the search query?

Enhanced Lookups can handle whitespaces and all variations in formatting, as long as the alphanumeric characters (A-Z, a-z, and 0-9) in the search query are entered correctly (in the same order). For example, all of the following user queries are eligible for Enhanced Lookups and return products containing abc-123 in any of the configured fields in the feed:

• abc123
• AbC123
• a-bc1_23
• abc 12#3
• A b ;) c 1 2 :-) 3
• Abc-123

3. Which languages do Enhanced Lookups support?

Enhanced Lookups (and default Lookups) work with all languages supported in multi-language Discovery Search. The allowed variations in user queries are the same across all languages.

4. What happens to accent marks and non-English characters?

Accented characters (like é, ä, ø, and more) or other characters from non-English languages (like ß, Д, ç, क, and more) present in configured Lookups fields and user queries are ignored for Enhanced Lookups matching. These aren't considered as 'alphanumeric' characters in the scope of this enhancement.

For example:

• User query aßc-123 (normalized to ac123) doesn't match the part number abc-123 (normalized to abc123) in the feed.
• User query äabc_क_123ø (normalized to abc123) matches the part number abc-123 (normalized to abc123) in the feed.