The Empathy Platform’s Self-managed Components (SmC) package allows you to customize and personalize the search and discovery experiences. Discover the key areas you can modify to replicate your business requirements and try the SmC package's performance.

Catalogs

The SmC package includes as catalog a subset of the public IMDb movie dataset pre-configured for English.

However, you can modify the catalog to index your own product data. To do so, go to the catalog/en folder (inside the indexing/collection-files parent folder), which contains information about the indexed products. Then, replace the sample data with your own product data, ensuring it follows the schema defined in the mapping.json file (which contains the Elasticsearch mappings (opens new window)).

You can also modify the mapping.json file to index different types of catalogs. Remember that the built-in frontend interface shows information in the following fields:

• Name: __description
• Image: first image in the __images array
• Price: __prices.current.value

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Read more information about how to personalize the catalog and the format of the documents in the Child folders in collection files section of the SmC ecosystem page.

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Go through the How to customize SmC catalogs (opens new window) tutorial to learn about the catalog structure overview, the key parameters explained, and how to personalize your catalog.

Search configurations

The SmC package comes with pre-defined search configurations that you can modify to suit your specific needs. The srv/plugin-configs/imdb.json file contains the configuration for each endpoint: equalize, topclicked, and search.

Endpoints follow the same format and, inside the imdb.json file, you can see some feature configurations. There are two types of search configuration features: Fallback and Search features.

Fallback features

Fallback features are executed after the shopper performs a query. For example, the Spell Check feature checks the spelling of the query when low or no results are returned.

Search features

Search features are executed at query time. Among them, you find the following:

• Match Search (matchSearch) or Multi Match Search (mulitiMatchSearch): Customize how products are matched. Watch a quick demo on how to set up the Multi Match Search feature (opens new window).
• Filtering (filtering): Write filters that can be used in the endpoint URL to apply them to the requests.
• Faceting (faceting): Filter the options to show to the shopper. Watch a quick demo on how to set up the Faceting feature (opens new window).
• Sorting (sorting): Check the default sort options and the possible fields that can be used for sorting. Remember to add the options to the whitelist.
• Pagination (pagination): Decide the number of results per page.
• Grouping (grouping): Add it to group results by the same value in a field. Watch a quick demo on how to set up the Grouping feature (opens new window).
• Total Hits (totalHits): Show the number of total hits in the query.
• Search Hits (searchHits): Decide which fields to show in the endpoint's response.
• Debug (debug): Allow the debugging section to appear in the response.

You can set up some configuration options for showing promoted results, banners, and redirection links through the search endpoint.

Finally, the clientconfig section contains the client's ID (imdb), its pivots, and the option to work without a plugin (downloaded search experience without customizations).

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You must not overwrite the clientconfig section.

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Dive deeper into the How to Customize SmC Search Experience (opens new window) tutorial to learn more about configuring searchable fields and weights, filtering and faceting, pagination and grouping, debugging and optimizing search results, and much more!