Indices are used to group data with similar attributes. Doofinder provides this product by default, allowing you to create additional indexes or completely replace the default product index.
Additional Indices
To create an additional index for Prestashop, Shopify, Bigcommerce, Woocommerce/Wordpress and Magento, follow these steps:
1.Go to Search engines > Settings > Indices.
2.By default, there is a product indice already created for you. To create another one, click on "Configuration".
3.A pop-up window called Index Configuration will appear, in which you must enable the 'Advance Indices Configuration' option to display the indices options.
4.Select the type of data you are going to index:
-Blog & Articles
-Website pages
-Product Categories
and save.
Your new indice will be automatically created and you only need to index the data.
To do so, click on the 'Process Now' button.
If you are not using one of the platforms mentioned above, you can create your index manually 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.
Remember:
Do NOT use special characters or blank spaces to separate words. Instead, use the underscore character ( _ ).
Also, the indice name is case sensitive and should always be in lowercase.
To remove an indice, there’s a trash icon on the right-hand side of each added indice.
📌 Note: Use this option cautiously as it also deletes the data indexed in this indice. Once deleted, you cannot recover it!
Once you have deleted an index, if there is no index, you can create one by clicking on "+Add index" and start the process again.
Using Doofinder’s API Requests
You can also manage indices from your website using Doofinder’s API to request changes in your search engines. For more information on this, see Learn more about the Management API.
Combining Feeds and APIs
Doofinder, by default, processes your feeds daily.
That is just about enough for most sites that update their products overnight. However, if your e-commerce store manages stock on the fly, you may want to update or remove some products when they are out of stock or add new ones when you create them on your site.
This is very useful, especially when you have many documents in your search index. By combining feeds and APIs, you will not have to re-index all of them over and over, particularly when making just a few updates.
Through Doofinder’s APIs, you can perform single (or batch) operations to update certain documents in Doofinder. These updates will be applied to your search index immediately. This way, your data feed acts as the single source of truth such that each time it is processed, all the data in your index will be replaced by the contents of the feed, which Doofinder will then update with the latest content on your site.
📌 Note: If you add items via API, process and outdate the data feed, your index will also be outdated. This will also affect you if you configure your feed to process the data automatically.
Switching between API and Feeds
Business can change, and the way you feed your search engines can also change. In addition, the way you add items to your search results may also need to change.
You can start working with your search engine by adding items via API and then change to a URL-based data feed. There’s no problem with that, but remember that you will lose all existing products when you process your file feed, including those indices, via API because you used the data feed as the source of truth.
📌 Note: If you plan on changing the way you feed your search engine, we strongly recommend that you begin with a new search engine and perform tests there before switching to the production environment. You might not need all the configurations you have already added to your old search engine.
Multi-Index Layer
The Multi-Index Layer allows you to have separate types of results from different indexes in the search layer in addition to products, such as store categories or collections, blog posts and other content you want to share.
Take a look at this example:
If you wish to implement this layer, please click here.