The Product Data Feed

Doofinder needs to be ‘fed’ with information on the products that should be displayed when searching. Understanding how the data feed works is very important to integrate Doofinder smoothly and make the most of it.

In this article, you’ll learn how to update and use:

The Product Data Feed
The Data Feed Information Fields
The Special Attributes Feature
The Faceted Search

The Product Data Feed

There are several ways to fed Doofinder with the products’ information. The most common are using a file or a URL. The file can be in .txt, .xml or CSV format. You can compress such a feed file in .zip, .gz, or .bz2 formats.

URL or FILE

Go to your Admin > Search Engines > Settings > Indices. If no data feed is provided during the store creation, you can add one by clicking on ‘Add Indice’.

Once clicked, you have to type a name, indicate what type of data you are going to index and choose whether you want to index your data via API, URL or file. Then click on create.

To enter the product information, you can paste the URL of the feed or upload a file to the system. To delete the source, click on the trash icon.

By default, Doofinder updates the feed once a day, so if you use the URL option, you can keep a feed up to date automatically.

Multiple Indices

If you have several indices within a search engine, you will be able to view them in different tabs. This is a very useful way to organize your product and content indices.

How to index Blog Content

To display categories and content in search results, it is necessary to index a content feed. It should be a .txt, .csv or .xml file, indexing at least the following fields:

id|title|link|image_link|description

Also, it is recommended to index a specific attribute for this feed, such as: isContent: 1

In this way, you can use this field to perform a default sorting of the results and, for example, make the categories always appear in the first position.

The Data Feed Information Fields

These are the fields of information that the feed must contain:

A unique identifier (ID): could be a number, a string, or an alphanumeric string. It must be unique for every product.
Description
Name
Link to the product’s page.

It is also great to include the following information:

Image URL (preferably in .jpeg format)
Price: selling price
Sale_price: discounted price (final sales price). If there is no discount, this field has to be empty.
Category or type

A plain text file is the easiest to use, where each line represents a product. The first line must specify the field’s name, and each field must be separated by:

tab
| (pipe)
; (semicolon)
, (comma)

For example:

📌 Note: You can add as many attributes as needed for the search (colour, size, weigh, brand…).If the product has many field names to specify, it is better to use the Special Attributes function, as explained later in this article.

Category Attribute

Best practice is to start with the most general category in the field names, and break them down to the finest specification.

A good example is shown here:

📌 Note: The image shows it as several lines, but it should be all on one line in the file.

Multicategory Attribute

You can configure various category trees. For instance, a sports shoe could belong to two categories like this:

Sports > Clothes > Shoes; or

Snickers > Jogging

E.g.

Sports > Clothes > Shoes %% Snickers > Jogging

Special Attributes Feature

If the type of feed you provide to Doofinder is in CSV format, and you have a wide range of attributes for different products, you would need, in the first instance, a very long header line to specify all the attribute fields.

The names of these fields can be numerous and lead to a long and confusing list. To avoid this, we use the "special attributes" function.

Let's say your e-commerce shop sells T-shirts, laptops and other electronic devices.

You would like to categorise T-shirts by size, colour, style and fabric, among other things. You would also like to categorise laptops and other electronic devices by screen size, hard disk size, hard disk type and video card manufacturer details, etc. In addition, the common price, brand, category, etc. should be included in the field headers. Such a field name would look like this, with all possible field names included:

This is clearly not very appealing.

In addition, most articles would have a collection of separators with empty values for the categories they do not fit into.

Using Doofinder's special attributes function, the above field name would be displayed as:

This is done by adding dynamic attributes to your products, as indicated in the following image:

For this purpose, the special field name attributes are used, and only the relevant attributes are added to each product in this way:

(...)|attribute-name=value/other-attribute=value2/third-attribute=value3|(...)

Doofinder will smartly separate them into different fields as needed.

Another example of a laptop categorisation before using the special attributes feature would be:

Toshiba Satellite L755|www.mygreatshop.com/laptop/toshibaL755.html|A powerful laptop with the best price you could find out there|1425|300.00|www.mygreatshop.com/img/toshibaL755|Toshiba|Laptops|||||17"|500Gb|Magnetic|NVidia

By using the special attributes function, it would then be:

📌 Note: We use the forward-slash symbol ( / ) to separate different attributes of the same item. However, there may be cases where it is necessary to use ( / ) as part of the value of an attribute, such as 1/4 oz and 1/2 oz, etc. In such a case, we include the backslash (\ ) before the ( / ) as follows 1\/2 oz, 1\/4 oz.

This is different from how we enter the (/ ) as part of a value in the faceted search.

The Faceted Search

Another data feed feature that will make using the Doofinder search engine even better is the "Faceted Search". Facets feature lets you filter search by certain fields.

This feature allows your website visitors to refine their product searches with filters such as brand, price, colour, material, etc.

In order to use the facet function in your data feed, the following must be taken into account:

If the value of the field to be used for the facets is unique for each product, you do not have to do anything else. For example, the brand field.

If a product can have several values of a facet (e.g. colour, size, etc.) the values must be separated by the / character, thus: blue/red/green.

However, if you want to include / as part of the value (say you want to use 1/4oz and 1/2oz as part of your possible values for a facet), use another / before, so 1oz / 1//2oz / 1//4oz.

Note that this is different from how we include / in special attributes.

If your feed has products grouped by categories and subcategories, and you want to filter them, make sure that the categories are separated by > having the most general category as the first one. Therefore, the category tree would look like this:

Hardware > Hard Drives > SSD

In this case, SSD is a subcategory within hard disks, which are also a subcategory of hardware.

You can also have several category trees for one product. Just separate them with %%. An example of a category field would be:

Hardware > Hard Drives > SSD %% Desktops > Peripherals > HDD

This is an example of an article with appropriate values for the facets:

Google data feed

If you prefer, you can use the Google Shopping data feed to supply product information to Doofinder, if so follow their specifications.

If you are using a Google Shopping Feed you can find it at Google Merchant Center

Once logged in, you should see this screen:

From here to go Products > Feeds.

Click on the name of the feed to be used.

You now have 2 options:

(a) To download a file. Under Process > Download file.

(b) To use the URL. Under Settings > Fetch schedule > Feed URL.

Finally, upload the file / URL to Doofinder. Go to your Admin > Search Engines > Settings > Indexes > once uploaded or pasted, click the Process Now button.