Salesforce B2C Commerce 24.7 > Merchandising Your Site > Search and Navigation > Keyword Searches

Search Indexes

Search indexes provide the data used to perform storefront searches. Expect to rebuild your indexes whenever you update product or content data, so that the data in the index is as current as possible.

Salesforce B2C Commerce search indexes use data from the following indexes: Product, Spelling, Content, Synonym, Suggest, Availability, and Active data.

There are two ways to update a search index:
  • Scheduled indexing: updates every search feature available on the storefront. You can rebuild an index manually or schedule it to be rebuilt daily. Rebuilding indexes requires time and resources, and can take anywhere from a few minutes to several hours, depending on the size of the storefront product data and the complexity of the search configuration. However, daily index rebuilds are recommended to keep indexes from fragmenting.
  • Incremental indexing: only updates some search features. Specific actions trigger index updates, such as a change to product data. The index is updated in near real time with the change.

Search index rebuilding processes in Business Manager are run sequentially in case one index relies on another.

  • Index Creation
    Salesforce B2C Commerce search indexes use data from these indexes: Product, Spelling, Content, Synonym, Suggest, Availability, and Active data.
  • Updating Indexes
    If you change your search configuration, you must rebuild the appropriate index to see the changes in your storefront.
  • Generate Search Indexes
    In Business Manager you can create stop words and synonyms, modify guided search ranking, view statistics, view index documents along with their indexed fields, and rebuild indexes. You can also manage the capabilities of full text search indexes.
  • Configure Search Index Language Options
    All allowed site locales are indexed by default in B2C Commerce. To reduce indexing times and overall resource consumption, you can exclude locales from indexing that don't have a particular set of data. You can also upload an extra dictionary for more directed and appropriate search results.
  • Run Queries on the Product Index
    You can enter a search phrase to run a query on the product index. This enables you to learn how each processor handles the phrase, the relevance score, and how it's derived. The search index execution plan viewer enables you to trigger the guided search parser with a phrase.
  • Create a Search Index Rebuild Schedule
    Scheduled indexing is used to fully rebuild an index automatically and regularly.
  • Incremental Indexing
    Indexes can be configured to rebuild incrementally, when product or category assignments are updated or on a schedule. If you enable incremental indexing for an index, then the index is automatically updated whenever a change is made to the products, content, or search configuration underlying the index. Changes to the index are available 30 seconds after a merchant makes a change. Incremental indexing can be enabled or disabled for each index type on each instance, but applies to all locales on the instance.

Infocenter Retirement: On June 30, 2023, the Infocenter was retired, and documentation currently hosted on the Infocenter will be published to Salesforce Help, Commerce Cloud Developer Center, and Salesforce B2C Commerce Developer Documentation Resources. For more information, see the release note.