Release Notes

Hello 👋 We are constantly making improvements to Bloomreach Discovery.
Check out this section to get fresh feature updates with each new release.

Suggest Edits

🚀 Release 2023-322

Release Date: 7 September 2023

Dashboard

🎉 Feature Updates

1. Group Merchandising

We are thrilled to share that Group Merchandising now supports Sequential Lock for groups at the global level. Additionally, we have added the capability to clone existing rules as Group-by rules.

What's New?

Ability to Sequentially Lock groups at the Global level: You can now lock up to 1024 product groups globally to create a curated brand experience.
Ability to clone existing Global and Query level rules as Group-by rules: With this update, you can now easily copy over existing attribute and blocklist customizations to a new group rule.

With these exciting new capabilities, you can optimize product groups globally and efficiently clone existing search rules as group rules. Check out the documentation articles to learn more - Group rules at the Query level, Group rules at Global level

Cloning Configurations

Exciting news for Cloning Configurations customers! Cloning Configurations now empowers you to seamlessly copy rules from the Staging (tools-staging.bloomreach) to the Production (tools.bloomreach) environment and vice versa.

What’s New
The Cloning Configurations UI features a new dropdown that lets you select the desired source environment to clone rules.

This upgrade takes workflow automation to the next level of efficiency! With this, you can author merchandising changes on Staging, preview and compare them with Production rules, and copy changes to your LIVE site in a reliable manner.

Check out the documentation to learn more. Please note that cross-environment copy will be ready for use from September 8th, following the Staging release. Before this date, initiating a cloning job with Staging as the source could lead to an error.

⚡ Improvements

1. Group Merchandising

The External Changes module now correctly shows the PID of the product.

2. Merchandising audiences

“does not contain” support for URL and Referral URL: The Merchandising audiences UI now includes a new "does not contain" option for creating targeted exclusion rules. This allows you to conveniently exclude specific dimension values from both the URL and Referral URL dimensions.

3. Customizable Product Card Attributes & Metrics

Customizing product cards just got easier! You can now directly configure product card settings for a new rule without the need to save it beforehand. Earlier, it was necessary to save the rule before configuring the product card settings.

🚩 Known Issues

Facet Rule Editor: In the Preview module, the "Show changes" option displays incorrect facet ranking after reordering the numeric facets. This is because the Preview module currently does not display facets configured as range buckets and sliders. We will add support for displaying these correctly in the upcoming release.
Ranking Diagnostics UI and Preview module on the dashboard currently do not display facets configured as range buckets and sliders. We will add support for displaying these in an upcoming release.
Group Merchandising
- Drag-and-drop functionality to reorder groups may not work as expected for group rules. You can modify the order of groups by using the slot number selector instead. We will fix this in an upcoming release.
- For multisite customers, operations on products within groups may not work as expected. This will be fixed as part of the next release.

Search

🎉 Feature Updates

1. Facet Enhancements

We are thrilled to share that we are launching new facet enhancements to:

Empower you with controls to reorder numeric facets via the dashboard.
Enable slider for numeric facets on the Facet Manager dashboard.
Access all facets (number and text) ranked and returned by the algorithm

What changed?

On the Dashboard side

a. New controls to rank numeric facets: Earlier, the option to reorder facets was available for text-type facets, now we have extended this capability for numeric facets as well. Similar to text-type facets, the dashboard allows you to reorder numeric facets at the Global, Search, and Category levels as needed.

b. Turn on the slider via Facet Manager: Earlier, you could enable sliders ( min and max ) for a facet by passing the stats.field parameter in the FE API request. Now, you can enable the slider component at the Global level using the new dedicated UI options in the Facet Manager.

Visit this article to learn more about the new dashboard options.

On the API side - Unified ranking for numeric and text facets
Earlier, the API response returned text and range facets separately in facet_fields and facet_ranges objects, respectively.

Now, our algorithm retrieves and ranks all facets together - text, number, number_range, and number_slider. The new response format merges all facets, whether numeric or text, under the “facets” object. This makes it easier for you to access facets together in one place.

APIs targeted for this enhancement: Product Search and Category API, Pathways (Search and Category widgets), Thematic API.

Visit this new article to learn more about the latest V3 response format.

Who will this impact?

Integrating Customers: These enhancements are applicable to all customers whose go-live date is after 7 September 2023.
Live Customers: This will have no impact on existing customers. Please note that you can get the benefit of facet enhancements - merchandising number facets on the dashboard and merged facet response only on migrating to the new response format. Kindly reach out to your Technical Services representative if you’d like to implement these enhancements on your site.

2. SKU Searchability

We are thrilled to announce the release of the SKU Searchability feature. With SKU Searchability, you can show shoppers matching products and their variants when they search with specific variant attribute values.

What’s New
SKU Searchability lets you specify which variant attributes should be searchable at the SKU level only. This ensures that the search returns the product with all the relevant variants and hence improves the recall precision.

Who does this impact
SKU Searchability will be rolled out to all SKU Select customers. This includes both live and newly integrated customers. No migration efforts are required on your end.

Please note that there will be no impact on dashboards. You can still merchandise the attributes the way it was supported before. Visit the article to learn more about this feature.

👍
For maximal search efficiency, we recommend that you run a full feed job as soon as possible for SKU Searchability to take effect.

🚩 Known Issues

Latest V3 Facet Response: Facets marked as "number" type are returned as "text" type in the API response. We will fix this in the next release.
SKU Searchability may not work as expected if the variant attribute being searched on is a numeric attribute, i.e. the search for dimensional queries. A product may be retrieved when it matches attributes from different variants. This will be fixed in the next release. Please note that non-numeric attribute value searches will work as expected.

Catalog Management

⚡ Improvements

We have enhanced the way you can edit and promote changes in Catalog Management.
What Changed?

Modify production configurations directly: You can now edit a catalog’s production configuration directly without going through staging. Earlier, you could only modify a catalog’s production environment by first promoting the entire staging configuration to production.
Selectively promote changes: When copying or promoting a configuration, it is now possible to use the difference viewer modal to include/exclude certain changes from being copied or promoted. Earlier, when copying or promoting, all changes would go together.

The system will now reject any data ingestion jobs as invalid where a filename is expected but not provided. Earlier the request used to fail.
Any records from the feed with an empty string as primary ID will now be ignored. These were allowed earlier under certain conditions.

🚀 Release 2023-321

Release Date: 10 August 2023

Dashboard

🎉 Feature Updates

1. Group Merchandising

We are thrilled to share that Group Merchandising now empowers you to merchandise the products within groups!

What's New?

You can boost, bury, block, or sequentially lock products within groups at Search, Category, and Global levels.

Additionally, we are launching the following capabilities in this release:

Ability to add products to recall for grouped rules

Ability to preview the merchandising changes before saving

Ability to view products within the Others group

With these exciting new capabilities, you can optimize product displays within groups, ensure that the right groups take center stage, and present a tailored shopping experience to your shoppers. Check out the documentation articles to learn more - Group rules at the Query level, Group rules at Global level.

2. Sequential Lock

We are excited to share that the Sequential Lock is now generally available. Read on to learn more about the newest enhancements!

What's New?

Product Bulk Selection for Sequential Lock and other Product Grid operations: With this update, you can now select and add multiple products to the Product Grid at once by simply uploading a CSV file or pasting a list of PIDs. Combined with other Bulk operations, you can save a significant amount of time by minimizing manual selection and addition of products, allowing you to focus on the specifics of your Curated Pages. Check out the documentation article to learn more.

Recommendations and Pathways support for Sequential Lock: You can now apply sequential lock operation to curate Search and Category widgets for the query level rules.

3. Segmented Merchandising

Here's some exciting news for Discovery Real-Time Segments customers! We are introducing the Segmented Merchandising feature in this release.

What's New?

Segmented Merchandising is a new powerful feature that combines Discovery’s broad Product Merchandising capabilities with Bloomreach Engagement’s rich customer data.

With this feature, you can create personalized and targeted merchandising rules for a highly-specific group of customers defined by real-time customer data attributes from your site.

In this example, only customers belonging to the luxury segment see boosted products — In this example, only customers belonging to the luxury segment see the boosted products.

Segmented Merchandising helps you focus on and create tailor-made Product Grids for segments of shoppers that are most likely to drive conversions, providing an in-depth solution to targeted merchandising.

Check out the documentation article to learn more.

⚡ Improvements

On adding a new view in the feed, the dashboard now syncs the new view correctly.

🚩 Known Issues

Group Merchandising

For multi-site customers, operations within the group may not work as expected. We will fix this as part of the August 31 release.
Attribute rules are not supported for operations within groups.
The External Changes module does not show the PID of the product.

Segmented Merchandising

Editing site level Audience on the account level may not work as expected. If you make changes to the same dimension using an "OR" case and click Cancel, the configuration changes might still appear on the Merchandising Audiences homepage. The canceled changes disappear on page reload. This is targeted to be fixed in the next release.

🚀 Release 2023-311

Release Date: 20 July 2023

Dashboard

🎉 Feature Updates

1. Customizable Product Card Attributes & Metrics

We are thrilled to share that you can now add Page Level Metrics to the product cards.

What's New?
This upgrade provides access to query/category-specific product data for the past 7, 14, and 30 days at both the Global and Rule-specific levels.

By adding Page level metrics to your product cards, you gain valuable insights into the success of your products for a particular query or category, enabling you to make strategic and data-driven merchandising decisions.

Check out the documentation articles to learn more - Global level Product Card Customization, Rule Specific Product Card Customization.

2. Sequential Lock

Creating curated experiences for your shoppers is now even more effortless! We are excited to share that we now support Bulk operations for Sequential Lock.

What's New?
With this update, you can now perform the following operations on multiple products at once:

Select, drag, and drop products within or outside the Sequential Lock range
Search products and select them in bulk using the Left-side Product Search Panel

Bulk operations enable you to automate manual tasks, save time, and boost your productivity. Please note that Bulk upload products via CSV file and Copy and Paste PIDs will be available in the next release. Check out the documentation article to learn more.

Insights

⚡Improvements

We have made internal enhancements that'd enable you to view Insights reports for a particular domain.

Who does this impact?

Multi-view account customers having site configuration with no defined views.

What Changed?

Earlier, domain-specific reports weren't populating for customers having a multi-view configuration without view_id.
With this upgrade, customers can now explore all Insights reports at the domain level.

🚀 Release 2023-232

Release Date: 6 July 2023

Dashboard

🎉 Feature Update - Cloning Configurations

We are thrilled to share that the Cloning Configurations is now generally available. This feature empowers your merchandising teams to create rules in one site and promote them to another with a user-friendly workflow in the dashboard UI. The result is:

Reduced risk of errors on live sites.
Less manual effort, more productivity.

What's New?
The Cloning Configurations UI has been enriched with viewing options for the selected rule types.

You can now seamlessly preview and compare the rules on both the target and the source.

Seamlessly compare rules on the target and the source — Compare rules on the target and the source

We have also added filtering options for viewing new and pre-existing rules. This lets you verify changes and clone the desired configurations with consistency, accuracy, and reliability. Visit this article to learn more about the cloning workflow.

⚡Improvements

Synonyms: You asked, we delivered! We have enhanced the Synonyms interface to meet the needs of our multisite customers. The UI now allows you to view the sync status of Global Synonyms.

What Changed?
- Earlier, for multisite customers, the Sync status of Synonyms was visible only at the Domain level. There was no means of viewing the sync status of Global Synonyms when the site context was set to Global.
- Now, multisite customers can view the Sync status of Synonyms at the Global level. Additionally, we have added a Catalog sync status column that specifies the number of catalogs in sync. Visit this article to learn more.

Customizable Product Card Attributes & Metrics: After applying customizations to a ranking rule, the product cards now correctly show the Site level metrics for the merchandised products.

What Changed?
Earlier, for modified products, the Site level metrics didn't show up on switching the site context. We made changes to ensure that the metrics are shown for products.

Frontend

🎉 New Feature Alert - View Merchandising Data in the API Response

We are excited to share that we are introducing a new parameter that fetches merchandising operation details on the Search and Category API response. As part of this release, we will expose Product Slot information in the response.

This would help you better understand the results and empower you with a valuable tool to debug via the API. Visit this article to learn more.

⚡Improvements

We have improved the handling of cross-origin requests for Autosuggest API.

What Changed?
Earlier, some cross-origin requests returned an error if the header origin was absent. These requests will no longer return errors as we'll fetch the URL value from the URL parameters.

🚀 Release 2023-231

Release Date: 15 June 2023

Dashboard

🎉 New Feature Upgrade - Ranking Diagnostics

We are thrilled to share that we're launching a revamped version of the Ranking Diagnostics Tool! This reinvented version takes your search debugging workflow to a whole new level of convenience.

Here's a snippet of the major updates and how they benefit you:

Enhanced Visual Elements: We've enriched the tool's UI with visual elements that make your interactions delightful and effortless. This includes interactive informational tooltips, dynamic typehead suggestions for the entered Category Name/ID, and supplemental labels for merchandising operations on the product cards.
Blazing-fast Performance: Our team has focused on fine-tuning the tool to supercharge your debugging efficiency and productivity. In addition to performance improvements, we've added a host of new features to help you unlock the tool's full potential and customize it as needed.
Overhauled "Synonyms applied" Section: The "Synonyms applied" section now gives you a more comprehensive view of how Synonyms influence your search. Not only does it make the inner workings of our machine-learning models more transparent, but it also empowers you with greater independence to diagnose and debug recall/ranking issues.
Modern and Responsive Design Makeover: The new UI sports a sleek, intuitive, and modern design that seamlessly adapts to any screen size, allowing you to work with unparalleled ease and comfort.

Visit the documentation article to learn more.

⚡Improvements

Customizable Product Card Attributes & Metrics
We are thrilled to share that you can now add Site Level Metrics to the product cards. This upgrade provides access to sitewide product data for the past 7, 14, and 30 days at both the Global and Rule-specific levels.

You can now add Site level metrics at both Global and Rule specific levels

By adding Site Level metrics to your product cards, you gain valuable insights into the success of your products, enabling you to make informed merchandising decisions and optimize your strategies for even greater results. Check out the documentation articles to learn more - Global level Product Card Customization, Rule Specific Product Card Customization.

We have improved the handling of merged attribute values. Merged attribute values are now correctly displayed in the “Current matching attribute values” section of the Attribute merchandising dashboard.

Search

⚡Improvements - Numeric Precision

Comma [,] and period [.] in the product query will now be treated interchangeably for Dutch, French, German, Hungarian, and Italian sites. We will support the below use cases:

Treat comma and period interchangeably when the decimal number has a 10th value present.
Treat comma and period interchangeably when the decimal number has both the 10th and 100th values present.

Please note that this applies to decimal numbers only. Comma and period will not be interchangeable for other use cases [e.g., decimal number with a 1000th value being present].

Analytics

⚡Improvements - Insights

Top Opportunities data is now populating correctly on the Account and Site group level.

🚀 Release 2023-223

Release Date: 1 June 2023

Frontend

🎉 New Feature Release - API Controls to Disable Merchandising Rules

We are thrilled to share that we are introducing new API controls that'd allow you to disable merchandising rules via front-end API calls.

This capability takes your AB Testing efforts to the next level, allowing you to holistically test the isolated impact of our algorithms on your site while removing the influence of merchandising rules.

Visit this article to learn more.

Recommendations

⚡ Improvements

We have made improvements to the Trending products algorithm. This enables the algorithm to generate product recommendations by leveraging shopper interaction data more effectively and ensuring that there's no data loss.

Dashboard

⚡ Improvements

The Facet Manager now correctly displays a newly modified facet for a "No Results" query.

Analytics

⚡ Improvements

We have improved the Insights querying mechanism to better handle queries with special characters. The dashboard now fetches and displays Key Metrics data correctly.

🚀 Release 2023-222

Release Date: 22 May 2023

Frontend

⚡Improvements

Audience rule that combines "URL IS" and "URL CONTAINS" dimensions in an OR condition is now working as expected.

Dashboard

⚡Improvements

Customizable Product Card Attributes & Metrics: The extended product card now displays the product image correctly.

Catalog Management

⚡Improvements

We have improved the error handling and error messaging in the Catalog Management UI. The system now correctly identifies an invalid patch during an ingest operation.

🚀 Release 2023-221

Release Dates: 4 May 2023, 9 May 2023

Search

🎉Feature Upgrade - Numeric Precision for non-English languages

We are thrilled to share that Numeric Precision now powers non-English sites in addition to English sites. The Numeric Precision algorithm powered by semantic understanding leverages natural language processing (NLP) to understand the numeric intent expressed in the shopper's query and builds a more precise recall set. This enhances your search relevance and leads to a smoother product discovery experience for quantitative queries.

Feature Access: Numeric Precision can be enabled directly on the API by passing a specific parameter to the front-end API call. Alternatively, Bloomreach Support can configure it for you so that it applies to all pages of the site.

Visit this article to learn more about this feature.

Pixel Integration

🎉 New Feature Release - Android and iOS SDKs

We’re excited to share that the integration of Bloomreach Pixels into your Native Mobile Applications has been made much easier with the availability of the new Android and iOS SDKs. Our software development kit provides simple-to-use and downloadable tools to integrate the pixels into your mobile application more quickly and efficiently than ever before.

Check out the guides for the Android SDK and iOS SDK for detailed information on their usage and specifications.

Front-end APIs

⚡Improvements

We've removed certain limitations on the Bestseller and Past Purchases APIs to improve the handling of empty query. Now, when an empty query parameter is used, the API will return product recommendations instead of an error.

Dashboard

🎉 New Feature Release - Customizable Product Card Attributes

We're happy to announce the launch of our latest feature: Customizable Product Card Attributes! This feature empowers you to handpick the metrics and data points that appear on the product cards in the Visual Editor. The feature lets you select and view essential e-commerce metrics like ATC, RPV, and CR and custom product data such as inventory levels or margins. With access to data that suits your unique needs, you'll be able to optimize your merchandising strategy and make data-driven decisions that meet your business objectives.

Visit this article to learn more about this feature.

⚡Improvements

The Discovery dashboard now allows for easy access to Bloomreach Academy. You'll find the navigation link in the Help section, making it convenient for you to resume your learning journey.

🚀 Release 2023-212

Release Date: 19 April 2023

Front-end APIs

⚡Improvements

Precision modes data in the front-end API response: You can now view Precision mode data in the front-end API response of search requests. For this enhancement, we have added a new section called "precision" under the metadata.query part of the fron-tend response. You can refer to this section to determine the configured as well as the applied Precision mode. Visit the documentation to learn more.
We have removed internal limitations w.r.t. views for a multisite customer on V2 Autosuggest API. This allows a more seamless migration from V1 to V2 API.

🚀 Release 2023-211

Release Date: 10 April 2023

Search

🚀Algorithm Upgrade - Enhanced Category Ranking Algorithm

We’re excited to announce the release of our Enhanced Category Ranking Algorithm! This next-gen category ranking algorithm leverages the latest techniques in supervised machine learning that might improve ranking on categories with limited user behavior data.

In the future, this upgrade will enable greater algorithm flexibility and customizability by ingesting new signals from customers and automatically determining the optimal weighting. This upgrade will also allow you to optimize the business goal from revenue to other measurable KPIs (e.g. profit).

⚡Improvements

We have enhanced our Facet Sorting mechanism for renamed Facet values. Now, Facets will be sorted based on their renamed values displayed in the dashboard. Before this change, Facets were being sorted based on their names provided in the feed.

Dashboard

⚡Improvements

The Already in Recall label is now showing correctly in the Global ranking rules Product Search panel.

🚀 Release 2023-132

Release Date: 23 March 2023

Search

⚡ Improvements

For non-English languages, the letter "x" and the special multiplication symbol "×" (Unicode U+00D7) in the query will be treated interchangeably to specify dimensions. For instance, both the queries “m10x100” and “m10×100” will be treated the same.

Front-end APIs

It is now mandatory to send the correct domain_key in the API request. Sending API requests without domain_key will return a 4xx error response. This applies to:

Note: If there are any incorrect integrations with domain_key for live customers, there will be no impact.

Dashboard

⚡ Improvements

Autosuggest blocklist is now syncing correctly.
Real-Time Customer Segments:
- When the segmentation training starts or ends, the merchandiser receives an email notification with a "Review Algorithm" button and a link to the Discovery Dashboard. We have updated the links so that it always takes the merchandiser to the account that contains the exposed segmentations.
- The "Ready to review" state has been renamed to "Ready to use."

Recommendations and Pathways

⚡ Improvements

Similar Product Widget: We are excited to share that we have upgraded our Similar Products algorithm. This enhanced machine learning-based algorithm enables you to recommend a range of similar products, and these recommendations are based on the product feed data. Visit this article to learn more.

🚀 Release 2023-131

Release Date: 13 March 2023

Search

🚀 New Feature Release - Algorithm Controls

We're happy to announce the launch of our latest feature: Algorithm Controls! This feature enables you to directly control and adjust 4 of our algorithms that power your search experiences. You can configure the algorithms through front-end API calls or Bloomreach's dashboard tool.

Go to Algorithm Customizations > Recall Algorithms to configure algorithms using the new Dashboard tool

⚡ Improvements - Facets

We have removed the Noisy Facet Limits that were earlier defined in our system. Going forward, there will be no limit on the number of facets shown on the dashboard. All the facets marked "facetable" on the Catalog Management UI will now be displayed on the Facet Manager dashboard. Our team has thoroughly tested the system's performance to ensure that it can handle the additional load and meet the needs of a wide range of business use cases.

Dashboard

The following Dashboard release items will not go live in this release as they did not meet our quality standards. These require additional testing and validation.

New Feature Release - Customizable Product Card Attributes & Metrics
Real-Time Customer Segments Improvements

The above items will be part of the next release scheduled for March 23rd, 2023.

Recommendations and Pathways

⚡ Improvements

auth-key validation is working as expected when it is passed in the request header.

🚀 Release 2023-122

Release Date: 22 February 2023

Search

⚡ Improvements

We have optimized the memory utilization for our Front End application.

Dashboard

⚡ Improvements

We have added a new Sync segmentation button in the Real-Time Customer Segments dashboard that syncs the exposed segmentations from Engagement to the Discovery dashboard.

We have updated the Pathways User permissions to include the ability to delete widgets in the dashboard.

🚀 Release 2023-121

Release Date: 8 February 2023

Recommendations and Pathways

🌟 New Feature Release - Recently Viewed Products Widget

We’re happy to announce the launch of our latest feature: Recently Viewed Products Widget! This recommendations widget empowers you to re-target the shoppers who have browsed or searched for specific products on your site but did not make a purchase.

Feature Highlights

User-based personalization: This feature enables you to display personalized product recommendations based on the shopper's purchasing history, browsing behavior, and preferences.
Boost conversions: You can re-engage and convert top-of-the-funnel shoppers by strategically placing personalized Recently Viewed Products Widgets on the Homepage, Add-to-Cart, Order Confirmation, and Product Description pages.

Explore our documentation to learn more about this feature.

⚡ Improvements

Pathways API no longer returns discrepancies in numfound when the “filter” or “filter_facet” parameter is applied to the attributes with the “ * ” value.

Dashboard

⚡ Improvements

We have enhanced the numeric boosting functionality to enable the internal balancing of the number values to be calculated per catalog now instead of only once at the account level. This gives you more granular and distinct boosting control between different catalogs.

Analytics

⚡ Improvements

Insights reports no longer show overlapping headers.

🚀 Release 2023-111

Release Date: 24 January 2023

Dashboard

⚡ Improvements

In Global Category Ranking Rules, Block operation is now working as expected in the left-side product search panel.

🚀 Release 2022-421 (OOB)

Release Date: 7 December 2022

Dashboard

⚡ Improvements

Category Ranking Rules are now displaying correctly in the Search & Merchandising dashboard.
Scheduled Redirect rules are now working as expected.

🚀 Release 2022-412

Release Date: 19 October 2022

In this release, we have added improvements and deployed internal changes to enhance performance.

🚀 Release 2022-411

Release Date: 13 October 2022

In this release, we have added improvements and deployed internal changes to enhance performance.

🚀 Release 2022-332

Release Date: 28 September 2022

In this release, we have added improvements and deployed internal changes to enhance performance.

Search

Improvements

Ranking Diagnostics no longer shows matches on certain static fields (like Categories) that have been configured as non-searchable.

Analytics

Improvements

Products Clicked From This Query report under the Access Performance section now shows a consistent result set after selecting a custom date range. The "Product page views" column with incorrect data has been removed.

🚀 Release 2022-331

Release Date: 14 September 2022

In this release, we have added improvements and deployed internal changes to enhance performance.

Dashboard

Improvements

Product ID search in Ranking Diagnostics now returns results for all the PIDs with spaces in their values.
The Help section now correctly displays links to the Discovery documentation and Support portal.

Analytics

Improvements

Category Page Diagnostic graph data is now correctly populating in Top Categories reports.

🚀 Release 2022-323

Release Date: 6 September 2022

In this release, we have added improvements and deployed internal changes to enhance performance.

Search

Improvements

The inches symbol used in facet value aliases is returned correctly under the Facet Values in the Search API call.

🚀 Release 2022-322-1 (OOB)

Release Date: 25 August 2022

In this release, we have added improvements and deployed internal changes to enhance performance.

Dashboard

Improvements

Changing a Global facet's Display Name now correctly shows the updated name instead of showing "currentValue".

🚀 Release 2022-322

Release Date: 22 August 2022

In this release, we have added improvements and deployed internal changes to enhance performance.

SEO

🚩 Known Issue

Products(PIDs) with Add to Recall enabled at the Global level appear under the External Changes tab.

This issue will be fixed in an upcoming release.

🚀 Release 2022-321

Release Date: 3 August 2022

In this release, we have added improvements and deployed internal changes to enhance performance.

Search

Improvements

The Search API call no longer returns an incorrect 5xx error response after modifying a facet rule.

🚀 Release 2022-312

Release Date: 20 July 2022
In this release, we have added improvements and deployed internal changes to enhance performance.

Search

Improvements

The meta section of the Front-end API response will now reflect the Dashboard changes made to a theme's indexability.

🚀 Release 2022-311

Release Date: 6 July 2022

In this release, we have added improvements and deployed internal changes to enhance performance.

Search

🌟 New Feature Release - Semantic Search in French and German

We are excited to launch Semantic Search in French and German. This feature enables you to leverage our French and German semantic understanding signals into the highest revenue drivers, specifically Search Ranking and Search Recall.

Feature Highlights

Search Ranking: Improve ranking for torso/tail queries in French/German by understanding user intent from the product type. This provides much more accurate and relevant results compared to traditional keyword searches, ultimately improving your conversions and revenue.
Search Recall: Reduce null results with smart query relaxation, which allows us to show similar products when we can’t find an exact match. For example, if a customer searches for Brand A armchair and that product doesn’t exist, we can show Brand B armchairs that are very similar instead of taking the customer to a null results page. This creates a better experience for the user and should lead to higher conversions.

Enablement: All new and existing customers with French or German catalogs will have this enabled by default.

Explore our documentation to learn more about this feature.

🚀 Release 2022-232

Release Date: 22 June 2022

In this release, we have fixed critical bugs, added improvements, and deployed internal changes to improve performance.

Analytics

🌟 New Feature Release - Pixel Monitor Phase II

Pixel Monitor now offers the following new capabilities:

Site-level monitoring: Multisite customers can now monitor pixel integration at the individual site level. Pixel monitor will be no longer accessible at the account and site group level.
Pixel monitor is now available for Relevance by Segment and Content Search features.

These enhancements will be automatically rolled out for existing Discovery customers. No additional implementation is required.

Explore the documentation here:

Search

Improvements

SKU level dynamic facets would not work with the SKU values containing the character "|".
For non-English catalogs, query relaxation would return a broken-up version of the query.
Searching for "Delia" returned no results because the brand name was being stemmed as the Italian stopword "del".

These bugs have been fixed.

🚀 Release 2022-231

Release Date: 9 June 2022

In this release, we have fixed critical bugs, added improvements, and deployed internal changes to improve performance.

Dashboard

🌟 New Feature Release - Add to Recall

Bloomreach Discovery is introducing a new merchandising operation called Add to Recall. This feature will allow you to add a product to any query recall.
You can decide the product's placement or let the algorithm rank it.

In the case of Global/Account level or Multi-Query Boost to Top/Slot rules, the products will not be force added to the recall of all queries now. You can specifically toggle Recall ON to add the product to the recall of influenced queries. Explore the documentation here.

🚧
This feature is supported for Search Ranking rules, Category Ranking rules, Global Ranking configurations, Multi-Query, and Account level rules. Add to Recall is not supported for Recommendations and Pathways in this release.

🚩 Known Issue

Using the Left-hand side panel for blocking a PID is not working in the Dashboard.
At the widget customization level, when a PID is added from the Left side search panel or included in a Global ranking rule with Add to Recall toggle enabled, the count displayed under the Changes tab will be incorrect. This is just a UI issue. There is no impact on the functionality or on the API response.

These issues will be fixed in the upcoming releases.

Search

These bug fixes won't go live in this release. They will be part of a future release.

SKU level dynamic facets would not work with the SKU values containing the character "|".
For non-English catalogs, query relaxation would return a broken-up version of the query.
Searching for "Delia" returned no results because the brand name was being stemmed as the Italian stopword "del".

Analytics

🐛 Bug fixes

Bug: Insights Explore Bar would not return data for a number of queries.

Fix: This issue has been fixed.

🚀 Release 2022-222

Release Date: 25 May 2022

In this release, we have fixed critical bugs, added improvements, and deployed internal changes to improve performance.

🚀 Release 2022-221

Release Date: 11 May 2022

In this release, we have fixed critical bugs, added improvements, and deployed internal changes to improve performance.

Dashboard

🐛 Bug fixes

Bug: Terminated accounts still appeared in the Dashboard dropdown selection.
Fix: Terminated accounts have been removed from the dropdown.
Bug: Thematic pages were not displaying added products in preview and API response.
Fix: This bug has been fixed.

🚀 Release 2022-212

Release Date: 28 Apr 2022

In this release, we have fixed critical bugs, added improvements, and deployed internal changes to improve performance.

Dashboard

🐛 Bug fixes

Bug: The Dashboard displayed an error when the user created two sets of audiences with the same dimensions but different conditions.

Fix: This bug has been fixed.

🚀 Release 2022-211

Release Date: 13 April 2022

In this release, we have fixed critical bugs, added improvements, and deployed internal changes to improve performance.

Dashboard

🐛 Bug fixes

Bug: Using the "Clear operations" option for removing bulk operations caused a discrepancy between the Dashboard and Front-end response.

Fix: This bug has been fixed.

🚀 Release 2022-133

Release Date: 30 March 2022

In this release, we have fixed critical bugs, added improvements, and deployed internal changes to improve performance.

Dashboard

🐛 Bug fixes

Bug: The products displayed on the site did not sync with the ranking rules when a disabled ranking rule was renamed.
Fix: This bug has been fixed. We have added a check to validate the status (enabled or disabled) of the rule before sending the update message to the front end.
Bug: IAM User Management admins faced issues when resetting a user's password. New users faced issues when resetting their passwords for the first time via password reset mail.
Fix: This bug has been fixed.
Bug: For customers using SSO Login, users with IAM admin access could not find the users under the User Management tab.
Fix: This bug has been fixed.

🌟 Improvements

In Site search Facets and Categories Facets, the label for Blacklisted facets is now "Always Hide Facets" instead of "Blacklisted".

🚩 Known Issue

Using the "Clear operations" option for removing bulk operations is causing a discrepancy between the Dashboard and Front-end response.

Instead of using the "Clear operations" option, we recommend that you use Un-boost, Un-bury, Unlock or Restore option provided under the + menu in the top right corner of the product cards.

This bug will be fixed by our team in an upcoming release. In case you face any issues while removing bulk operations, please contact the Bloomreach Support team.

Analytics

🐛 Bug fixes

Bug: The Category collections data was not loading.
Fix: This bug has been fixed.

Release 2022-132

Release Date: 16 March 2022

In this release, we have fixed critical bugs, added improvements, and deployed internal changes to improve performance.

Search

Bug Fix

Bug: Product suggestions were disabled in the configurations but product suggestions would still show up in the Autosuggest v2 API response.

Fix: This bug has been fixed.

Dashboard

Known Issues

IAM User Management admins will face issues when resetting a user's password. New users will face issues when resetting their passwords for the first time via password reset mail.

Please get in touch with Bloomreach Support if you'd like to request a password reset.
For customers using SSO Login, users with IAM admin access may not be able to find the users under the User Management tab.

Please get in touch with Bloomreach Support if you want to update users.

Note: Both these issues will be fixed in an upcoming release.

Release 2022-131

Release Date: 2 March 2021

In this release, we have fixed critical bugs, added improvements, and deployed internal changes to improve performance.

Search

Improvement

Prior to this release, stop words would be dropped from both the left hand side (LHS) and right hand side (RHS) of a synonym. This made it impossible to add synonyms for phrases that had stop words in them (e.g., "souffleur de feuilles" => "souffleur").

On English catalogs, we keep stop words on both sides. However, in feed processing we generate tokens after dropping the stop words due to which in some cases the synonym with a stop word in the RHS wouldn't get applied (e.g., "stripe" => "black and white"). No match would be found since the synonym has a stop word but processed feed data would not.
- With this release, we have unified the behavior for both English and non-English catalogs. We will not remove stop words from the LHS but only from the RHS of the synonym. This will solve both the issues listed above. In non-English catalogs, it will honor a synonym with a stop word on the LHS and for English catalogs, it will honor synonyms with a stop word in the RHS.

Dashboard

Improvement

The Facet Rule Editor now includes a value option for the "category" attribute. You may now set the default sort algorithm for category facet values.

Release 2022-122

Release Date: 16 February 2021

In this release, we have fixed critical bugs and deployed internal changes to improve performance.

Search

Bug fix

Bug: Merged Facets with facet values containing special characters would return 0 results when applied as a filter.

Fix: Facets with values containing special characters can now be merged, and will return the correct number of results when applied as a filter.

Dashboard

Bug fix

Bug: Removed rules would not be synced.
- Fix: There is now a check in place to verify if a rule has been deleted before it can be updated. If you attempt to update a deleted rule, an error message will appear with an option to save the rule as a new rule. In case of a status update, you will be informed that the rule has been deleted and the page will refresh.
Bug: Ranking Diagnostics could match on non-searchable fields.
- Fix: Ranking Diagnostics now respects the searchability configuration of static fields like category crumbs, product id, and a few others. If these fields are configured to be non-searchable, they will not be displayed in the "Other Searchable Fields" section.
Bug: For Thematic Pages, extra data such as "\t" or "\r" would be appended to the header (h1) then stored in the database.
- Fix: Extra data before and after the header text will now be trimmed. There are now also checks that trim any extra spaces and tabs present in the header text

Analytics

Bug fix

Bug: When making changes to the Product Grid from Opportunities, the save button would not stop spinning.
- Fix: This bug has been fixed.
Bug: For multisite accounts, Opportunities would sometimes display the wrong title for category pages on the Diagnose screen.
- Fix: This bug has been fixed.

Release 2022-121

Release Date: 2 February 2021

In this release, we have fixed critical bugs, added a new feature and improvements, and deployed internal changes to improve performance.

Recommendations and Pathways

Feature release

Contextual Merchandising

Contextual Merchandising allows for dynamic recall or ranking of Recommendations based on the attribute values of the product being viewed.
Contextual Merchandising rules can be added in the Dashboard for some widget types.

Read the external documentation to learn more about this feature.

Release 2022-111

Release Date: 20 January 2021

In this release, we have fixed critical bugs, added improvements, and deployed internal changes to improve performance.

Search

Bug Fix

Bug: The efq parameter would not work with merged facet values for Search and Pathways.
Fix: This bug has been fixed.

Dashboard

Bug Fix

Bug: Synonym sync statuses would keep changing when the page was refreshed.
Fix: The cause of this issue has been identified and fixed.
Bug: SOLR calls would fail if a product was slotted at position -1.
Fix: A check has been added to disallow products from being slotted at position -1.
Bug: Some bugs would cause an error to be displayed when saving edits to an existing widget on the production Dashboard.
Fix: These bugs have been fixed.
Bug: Filtering the list of Thematic pages by index status would have no effect and no pages would be filtered.
Fix: Filtering by index status now applies the filter properly.

Analytics

Bug Fix

Bug: For the "No search result keywords" report, the downloaded data would not match the report in the Dashboard.
Fix: This bug has been fixed and downloaded data now matches the report in the Dashboard.

Release 2021-412-1 (OOB)

Release Date: 17 November 2021

In this release, we have fixed critical bugs, added improvements, and deployed internal changes to improve performance.

Dashboard

Bug Fix

Bug: Incorrect site data was being shown on the account level for categories.
Fix: The default site's data will be shown on the account level

Release 2021-412

Release Date: 27 October 2021

In this release, we have fixed critical bugs, added improvements, and deployed internal changes to improve performance.

Dashboard

Bug Fix

Bug: The Synonyms page would sometimes list duplicate users in the Users column, where the duplicate username would be surrounded by double quotes. Duplicate users could also appear in the Filter menu.

Fix: Duplicate users will no longer be present in the Users column or Filter menu.

Bug: The "Last synced at" section in the sync status tooltip would sometimes display "Invalid Date" instead of a timestamp.

Fix: This bug has been fixed.

Improvement

The Synonyms UI has been improved:

Improved messaging for Add/Edit Synonyms for multi-sites
Improved messaging for deletion of User Modified Synonyms
Added a tooltip with supported format hint for one-way and two-way Synonyms in the Add Synonyms modal

Release 2021-411

Release Date: 18 October 2021

In this release, we have added improvements and deployed internal changes to improve performance.

Dashboard

Improvement

Bloomreach’s Thesaurus feature is now called Synonyms and has been given several UX and performance enhancements. For more details on these enhancements, read the Synonyms documentation.

Visibility into Bloomreach Generated Synonyms
User Created/Modified Synonyms and Bloomreach Generated Synonyms are now separated into different tabs for easier management
Added bulk operations support
Added sort and filter
Simplified interface

During Auth0 outage, the Dashboard would not load for logged in users.

Auth0 outages should not impact already logged in users for 24 hours.

Release 2021-333

Release Date: 29 September 2021

In this release, we have added improvements and deployed internal changes to improve performance.

Improvement

Dashboard

Some sections of the Dashboard have been updated with the new Bloomreach logo.
Navigation now prioritizes the loading performance of the current application, and other applications/pages will not be loaded until navigating to that application. This should improve the overall loading experience for navigating between Discovery applications/pages, especially DevStudio, Insights, and User Management.

Analytics

The Null Search Results report shows the query keywords for which no results are returned on the site. However, sometimes users may apply filters that can result in zero results returned via API. The current Null Search Results report does not show the filter information for such keywords.

The Null Search Results report now filters out the keywords that resulted in zero search results due to the application of filters.

DevStudio

Improved the performance of feed status page load.
Fixed an incorrectly displayed feed status indexing failure message, where an in-progress feed indexing job would show as a failure in the UI whenever there was a simultaneous in progress feed processor job.

Pathways and Recommendations

The Pathways and Recommendations filter parameter allows users to filter products based on attributes, but it does not return all facet values of the attribute field on which the filter is applied, unlike the filter parameter for native Search APIs.

A new parameter filter_facet is available for Pathways (only for Search and Category Widgets APIs), which does display the other values of the attribute field after a filter is applied. You can read more about filter_facet here.

Release 2021-331

Release Date: 1 September 2021

In this release, we have added improvements and deployed internal changes to improve performance.

Dashboard

Improvements

The Testing tab was taking very long to load. The loading time is now greatly reduced.

Release 2021-322

Release Date: 23 August 2021

In this release, we have added a new feature and improvements and deployed internal changes to improve performance.

Dashboard

New Feature

Category Facet Inheritance

The Category Facet Inheritance feature expands BloomReach's merchandising capabilities by allowing rules that are set on parent categories to cascade down to child categories in a category tree structure.
This feature expedites Category merchandising at scale in an efficient manner as the child categories can inherit Facet rules from the parent categories, instead of manually curating Facets for each category node at a time.
Finer grain control for Inheritance Settings at each Category node to address advanced Category Merchandising use case.
Please head to our external documentation to learn more about this feature.
This feature will be made available to customers in a phased manner. If you are interested in this feature, please reach out to your DXM and make a request.

Improvement

UI/UX improvements on Ranking Diagnostics:

Added PID in the product card.
Now shows 4 products per row (to keep it consistent with Visual Editor and Preview) instead of 3.

Release 2021-321-1 (OOB)

Release Date: 11 Aug 2021

In this release, we have fixed critical bugs and deployed internal changes to improve performance.

Improvements

Dashboard

Due to incorrect regex patterns, PIDs containing -t- and -f- were converted to T and F respectively, and slotting operations for those PIDs were not respected.

This issue has been fixed. Any slotting operations on PIDs containing -t- and -f- are now respected.

Release 2021-232-1 (OOB)

Release Date: 30 June 2021

The OOB releases contain critical issues that are added to the product outside the regular release cycle and are made available independently.

Improvement

Dashboard

Dynamic facet support is now extended to SKU attributes.

Release 2021-232

Release Date: 23 June 2021

In this release, we have fixed critical bugs and deployed internal changes to improve performance.

Improvements

Dashboard

The "Homepage overview" link under Insights > Library > Overview was missing.

Fix: The "Homepage overview" link is visible again.

Some users experienced missing links in the Dashboard, even if they had been granted the correct permissions.

Fix: Users can access these links in the Dashboard according to the permissions granted.

Release 2021-231

Release Date: 10 June 2021

We are constantly making improvements to brX Discovery. In this release, we have fixed critical bugs and deployed internal changes to improve performance.

Improvements

Search

When FQ was applied on a renamed facet or facet value, some facet values would either return 0 results or show a different facet value after applying FQ on the facet.

Fix: Facet values that return 0 results are not part of the facet. Facet values will now show the appropriate count after applying FQ on a renamed facet.

Analytics

Fixed an issue with downloading reports.

Release 2021-212

Release Date: 28 Apr 2021

We are constantly making improvements to brX Discovery. In this release, we have fixed critical bugs and deployed internal changes to improve performance.

Improvements

Search

When a facet was renamed and configured to “Always Hide” from Dashboard, the front-end response would still show the renamed facet.

A temporary fix has been deployed that will use the original facet value along with the aliased facet value to boost/bury.

Dashboard

When editing an audience, dimensions that were already used for that audience could be selected again from the dropdown menu.

Dimensions that have already been used can no longer be selected when adding a new dimension to an audience.

Analytics

The report, "Daily Site Search Vs Non Site Search Performance", could show negative values in the "Non Site Search Visits" column.

The calculation for non-site search visits has been fixed, using the formula: non-site search visits = total visits - site search visits.

Updated 2 days ago