May 2016 introduces 3 new features and improvements to 2 previously introduced features in active development.
May 2016 Summary:
- New: Search Preview
- New: Ajax v3 Autocomplete
- New: Product Insights
- Improved: Landing Pages
- Improved: Index Status page
- Bug fix: Alphabetically sorted facet values displaying less popular values
Search Preview (alpha)
The Search Preview tool is now available as an alpha release for internal testing. This tool allows our team (and eventually our users) to easily view search results for a site within the Searchspring Management Console and explore why a product is ranked where it is within a search result.
Ajax v3 Autocomplete (beta)
Ajax v3 Autocomplete has been launched on a few users’ sites this month. Beta users have already helped identify several quirks and questionable behavior, as well as demonstrated the powerful capabilities of the new version. The feature is built on top of Searchspring’s AJAX v3 framework for displaying products, which leverages Angular under the covers.
Product Insights (alpha)
Product Insights is the next addition to the Searchspring Insights Suite. Its goal is to provide a high-level overview of all product performance. It also highlights various top-performing and under-performing products. For poorly performing products, we offer recommendations to improve performance. The product detail page includes a sales funnel, IntelliSuggest trends, device usage, search history, and referring pages specific to each product.
Landing Pages (beta)
This month we have added front-end functionality to Landing Pages. This means that any Landing Pages created in the SMC will be available in the Search API. (AJAX v3 support will be coming soon as well, but it is not available yet.)
Fixed: Alphabetical Facet Value Display Order
The expected behavior for facet values sorted alphabetically is to show the most popular values first, in alphabetical order. A bug was introduced last month to Saluki causing values sorted alphabetically to ignore popularity and only sort alphabetically. This causes facets with more than the requested number of filters to possibly display less-popular values than previously.
A customer with over 500 Brand values noticed this change in behavior immediately after last month’s release. This month’s change fixes the problem.