Adobe Search and Promote Menus Explained

Through this post, we will try to explain the main menus and their functionalities here.

Home:


This menu holds the dashboard for viewing overall search system for a specific account. It includes below sections.

• Index Information,
• Terms Report,
• Null Search Terms Report,
• Crawl Performance,
• Search Form,
• Recent Changes,
• Alerts

Design:
This menu helps to adjust the design specific search configurations on a page. It includes,

• Navigation - Facets, Facet Rails(Group of facets), Breadcrumbs, Page Navigation, Menus, Recent Searches
• Templates - Section where we can create new templates. This templates includes both transport(.tpl) and presentation(.tmpl) templates.
• Banners - Helps to add HTML Banner
• Autocomplete - Setting up auto complete, word lists, styles of search form and its form related configurations are available in this section.

Rules:

• Query Cleaning -  When the query is hit on the browser, if we need to clean up the query, this rules can be used.
• Direct Hits -  For a specific query term, if we need to redirect to a specific url, we can do the same here.
• Pre-search rules - This rules gets executed before the search happens; useful when we need to do an operation on query term(for eg: check query contains a specific word)
• Post search rules- This gets executed once a search is done and result is available. (An example could be, if a custom variable is present and its value is meeting some criteria)
• business rules - purely business queries. For eg if business wants to show a banner(promotional Advt) when the query term contains a specific term.
• Ranking rules - Helps to provide weights to metatags and adjusting its weights. Based on this, search results can be pushed up or down.

Linguistics:

• Dictionaries - to add our own dictionary.
• Words & Language -  To add any conditions like case sensitivity, sound alike etc.
• Did you mean - If a user types a wrong spelled term and if we need to suggest him a relevant term.
• Excluded words - always helps to omit some terms from search.

Simulator:
An html form of search page in S&P environment. This helps to test the search functionality in Search and Promote itself. We can set up rules for various simulators.

Staging:

A section which gives idea on what are all things modified in stage and not yet pushed to live

Reports:
An over view section of all search operations. Index reports, term reports, Adobe analytics, alerts etc. Changes made by different users can be tracked here.

Index:
All indexing operations can be performed here. This include configuring new index, editing various types of indexes, running index, roll back etc.

Settings:
All account related and user related settings are found here. Crawl, searching, metadata, filtering, rules, analytics, seo, profile, account, user operations etc are managed through thi

s menu.

Accounts:

All accounts are listed here for a logged in user. If the person is a normal user with single account access, only one account will be listed here.

How , When , What, Where Adobe Search And Promote

This page contains details of flow of Adobe Search & Promote. 

Adobe Search & Promote is one of the leaders in websites Product & Content Searches. How it is different from other technologies is the way we can do customization in search. We can use one of the best feature available in market called promote.

The major aim of any search migration project are given below,

a)    Migration of legacy search system to Search & Promote platform.
b)    Return more relevant results
c)    Use customer-supplied metrics to rank search results

So the flow happens as given below.

•    Create new Search & Promote account for the team.
•    Define metadata schema & configure the URL entry points/ index connector.
•    Using report widgets to see data populated by verifying all results are indexed, verifying all results are returned in the data view & verify that keyword searches are returning best results as offered by S&P.
•    Designing search result pages
•    Facet based search implementation.
•    Implement Sort, facet, breadcrumb, pagination etc.
•    implement best way of navigation by making it easy for users to navigate results using nested facets.
•    More details on content search (data views, sort etc) and transport layer.
•    The output can be configured to deliver HTML or XML as requested by clients.
•    We can do ranking of results based on metrics on previous searches.

Extra Notes:

•    Debug any issues with the search functionality using debug options available and also through analyzing the transport layer output.
•    Then using business rules, direct hits we can display promotional content, such as banners, depending on specific search contexts.

We recommend adobe search & promote for any product/content search in any type of website. If you need assistance, contact Adobe: http://www.adobe.com/in/products/searchandpromote.html

Search and Promote to Adobe Target

Adobe has moved from Search to Search driven merchandising.

Adobe Target suggests merchandise and offers based on user search pages and search terms they have used. Adobe Target makes it easy to promote the right content to- best way of customization.
The implementation method and tool of target looks almost same as Adobe Search and Promote.

How the new search different from Search and promote?

 Test & Target is an improved version of Adobe Search and Promote, which helps users to test various search experiences, marketing products, or analyzing results pages mutually to determine the highest performers. Test & Target also facilitates the targeting of search results or pages to visitors based on past purchase data or prior category preferences. Target can also be easily incorporated into search results to provide product or content recommendations related to visitors’ searches.

 Adobe Target Features

Site Search Options

Vast amount of options like did you mean, dynamic image rendition, decision making refinements etc

Customized Display

based on algorithm target customize the top offering, most popular, highest rated etc.

Search intent
Brilliantly understands the user search based on linguistics, business rules etc to cater high quality results

Metrics based relevance

Based on the rules set, search items are ordered and placed on top so that the relevancy can be high

Analytics integration

Adobe analytics integrated with target helps to capture the search data for customers

Targeted promotions

Promotional items like videos, banner can be set on search results

Update; Adobe Search & Promote is now Adobe Target

How to debug issues with S&P?

S&P - Debugging issues:

How can we find Run log for S&P:
We can check process of S&P by appending URL as : /q=xxx&gsdo=searchpaths&gsdb=runlog&gsdblog=3

Search and promote Simulator in Browser without login:
just append the gscmc=1 parameter in the stage URL. That will load the simulator in the browser instead of login in S&P.

Analyse category or any complicate errors from page:
Add '&gsdb=searchpaths to the staged/live URL with query. Then 'view source' and look for the default search we can find more details.

Index logs

Majority of the indexing issues are published in index logs and by analysing it, we can resolve many of them.

Can we debug transport layer of S&P?

We can get the data passed from JSON layer to presentation layer by previewing the data. On template we need to select preview option to see the data output.

How to check syntax written in a temlate?
We have guided tags to create S&P output. While writing those, ust enable 'check syntax error' on template options. By doing this temlate throws error on save, when there is a syntax error.

Update; Adobe Search & Promote is now Adobe Target

Comparison between XML Vs HTML Vs JSON as Search And Promote output

There are many ways too display the Search And Promote outputs. Some clients asks for XML, some may ask JSON and some wants HTML.Let us see what are all the pros and cons of all these outputs? When we decided to go for S&P which format output we can go for.

Advantages of XML:

1. XML gives greater flexibility to display the results.
2. It is decoupled from presentation layer with more readabilty.
3. HTML look and feel can be changed any time without modifying the XML layer.
4. Same XML output feed can be used for mobile or desktop websites. No dependency on it during implementation.
5. Less size, more oriented with tags.
6. Webapp get more flexibility, to include any extra information or to restrict some data from users based on location or anything etc.

Extra changes will need to be made in the webapp to transform XML to HTML

Advantages of HTML:

1. Everything is ready with the output. 
2. Website owners need not work on further development because already the output is in html form.

But any change in UI can be an additional task in future.

Advantages of JSON:

1. Lightweight, more readable.
2. No xml tags.

Encoding from JSON to html can be a tedious task in the first time. 

In case of multi nested facets, it could be tedious to iterate through the deeper facets.

Update; Adobe Search & Promote is now Adobe Target