Hi guys!
I'm excited to present you the results of a recent work on CloudSearch. We did a major upgrade of underlying software infrastructure, and also did a lot of refactoring which resulted in the following new features and improvements:
- CloudSearch now supports a powerful query syntax. You can now search for "(apple OR logitech) AND mouse" and yes, the results will be just like you would expect: it will find mouses manufactured by Apple and Logitech. Another new query syntax feature is a wildcard search: "*technology" will find products containing "nanotechnology". For those looking for more precise definition of a new query language there will be an update of CloudSearch manual, I will announce it a bit later.
- We have spent a lot of time making the spellchecker more clever and I think the results were worth it. Related improvements are as follows: it tries to detect words mistakenly entered with space, for example: "wire less" will result in "wireless" suggestion (it also works in an opposite way: "ipodshuffle" will be corrected to "ipod shuffle"). Another change is that it corrects not only product titles (as it was before), words from descriptions, product options and other extra data are also used for spelling corrections.
- An important change in the way how we score products when the query contains multiple words. Products containing entered words more closely to each other will be ranked higher.
- "Did you mean" functionality was added. Earlier CloudSearch tried to correct spelling mistakes only when no results were found. Now it suggests a corrected query when it results in more relevant products/categories/etc. than the original:
http://cloudsearch.x-cart.com/static/images/did-you-mean.png
- The visual formatting of text excerpts (those that show highlighted search terms) was improved. We also strip css/javascript from static page contents now.
- Performance, performance, performance - despite the fact that the amount of features CloudSearch supports continuously grows, we managed to get a 15%-25% performance gain after a wide range of optimization actions.
There's no need to update your connector code, all CloudSearch users already received these updates.
As there were a major change in different CloudSearch components I would like to ask our users to give a feedback on new and/or improved features. If you think that some behaviour needs to be changed you are welcome to report it here.
P.S. Jeremy, thank you for your message regarding CloudSearch performance, things you pointed out will surely be addressed.
P.P.S. I will be on vacation from Aug 15th till Aug 31st. I apologize in advance if I won't be able to respond to some of you guys in this thread or via PM.