Partial Match | Miso Technologies

Introduction

By default, Miso’s Search engine returns products or content based on matching of all keywords. For example, if a customer shopping for shoes searches “blue Nike dunk low”, only products containing all four keywords: “blue”, “Nike”, “dunk”, and “low” would be returned. This can lead to highly relevant search results but also risks returning few results or an empty page if the product catalog doesn’t have exactly what the customer is looking for.

By using Partial Match, you can relax the search criteria to return products that only match some of the search keywords, thereby increasing the search recall.

The following steps assume you have already set up an engine for Search. If not, head over to the Quickstart guide to get started.

Do it with APIs

To enable Partial Match within Miso’s Search API, simply set the enable_partial_match parameter to true in the request body.

Additionally, you can modify the response by setting values for partial_match_mode and enable_partial_match_threshold:

partial_match_mode

Choose from blended (default) or separated.

Blended: When partial_match_mode is blended, keyword-matched items and semantically-matched items will be returned in the same, rank-sorted array.
Separated: When partial_match_mode is separated, keyword-matched items will be returned in a products array and semantically-matched items will be returned in a partially_matched_products array. A scenario where this is useful is if you only want to show semantically-matched products when the keyword-matched products are out of stock or not in your product catalog.

enable_partial_match_threshold

If partial_match_mode is set to separated, you can optionally provide a value for the partial match threshold. This parameter, which accepts an integer , informs Miso’s Search Engine when to provide partially matched results. For example, if we set "enable_partial_match_threshold" : 3 , partially matched results will only be returned when there are three or fewer exact keyword matches. By default, the partial match threshold is set to 5.

Let’s revisit our earlier example of shopping for shoes. Suppose we have a product catalog with the following items:

Without partial match enabled, if a user searches for “blue Nike dunk low”, a single product from the catalog would be returned, since only “Nike Dunk Low ‘University Blue’” matches all four keywords: “blue”, “Nike”, “dunk”, and “low”.

Request:

POST /v1/search/search
{
"q" : "blue Nike dunk low",
"user_id" : "user-123",
}

Response:

{
"data": {
    "products": [
            {
            "title": "Nike Dunk Low - University Blue"
            }
    ],
    "total": 1
}

Now let’s enable partial match, set the partial match mode to blended, and set the threshold to 5. In our example there is only one exact match, so we should expect to see partially matched products in a separate array. The partially matched results are ordered by relevancy to the user.

Request:

POST /v1/search/search
{
  "q" : "blue Nike dunk low",
  "user_id" : "user-123",
  "enable_partial_match" : true,
  "partial_match_mode" : "separated",
  "enable_partial_match_threshold" : 5
}

Response:

{
"data": {
    "products": [
        {
        "title": "Nike Dunk Low - University Blue"
        }
    ],
  "total": 1
    "partially_matched_products": [
        {
            "title": "Nike Dunk Low - Goldenrod",
            "_missing_keywords": ["1"]
         },
        {
            "title": "Nike Dunk High GS - White Midnight Navy",
            "_missing_keywords": ["2"]
        },
        {
            "title": "Yeezy Boost 350 V2 - Dazzling Blue",
            "_missing_keywords": ["3"]
        }
    ]
}

Now we are returning three additional products that share keywords with the search query and are likely to be relevant to the user.

Tips and Tricks

Before implementing partial match via API, you can visually preview the results with Dojo. Open the Advanced Settings pane in the Search Engine Sandbox and enter an integer value in the “ENABLE_PARTIAL_MATCH_THRESHOLD” box to get started.

Partial Match Dojo

To return a broader set of products that are related to the search terms, enable the semantic search parameter to have Miso’s search engine perform semantic analysis on the user’s query. For more information, see the Semantic Search recipe.