The HCL Commerce v9.1 release saw major changes in features, functionality, and technology. This blog series will focus on each of these components separately. Some examples of these changes include HCL Commerce Search, which is powered by Elasticsearch, a modern storefront that uses Next.js, containerized cloud-native architecture, modern business user tooling, and support for new integrations and companion software.
Part 3 of this blog series will focus on the capabilities of HCL Commerce Search powered by Elasticsearch.
Natural Language Processing (NLP)
HCL Commerce Search uses the Stanford CoreNLP, stable and well-tested tools that provide part-of-speech tagging and named entity recognition. These NLP tools, along with HCL, provide filters and matchmakers that improve search relevancy. The search functionality includes an integrated NLP toolkit with a broad range of grammatical analysis tools. It also has a fast and robust annotator for arbitrary texts, which improves search relevancy. NLP provides significant search relevancy enhancements and includes modern and regularly updated packages.
Range Filter
The range filter feature allows the user to find products based on a price range filter. The previous SOLR-based search did not process the range search effectively. HCL Commerce Search, powered by Elasticsearch, provides a more accurate result, which has a direct impact on the end-user experience.
Matchmakers
Matchmakers are special NLP extensions provided by HCL. They provide functionality like color matchmakers and measurement/dimension matchmakers. Color matchmakers provide mapping of child colors to color families and hero product grouping on the storefront to provide visual relevancy for searches that include colors. Measurement / Dimension Matchmakers provide conversion and matching for different units of measure (lbs., meters, grams, minutes, hours, etc.) and dimensions (Length, Width, and Height) when searching for product quantities or measurement values.
Conclusion
The HCL Commerce Search, powered by Elasticsearch, is a powerful component of the HCL Commerce platform. It consists of several Data microservices that run in their own containers and retain backward compatibility with the transaction server, storefront, and customizations. Some of these robust features and capabilities include NLP with Stanford CoreNLP, tokenization, part-of-speech tagging, name-entity-recognition, matchmaking capabilities, stemming, stop words, search rules, and synonyms. These capabilities allow for refined results, leading to a better end-user experience and higher conversions.
To obtain further information from our award-winning team, please visit https://www.perficient.com/who-we-are/partners/hcl.
Other Blogs in the Series
HCL Commerce V9.1 – The Power of the Next.js Ruby Storefront
HCL Commerce V9.1 – Coexistence of the Headless Next.js Ruby & Aurora Storefronts
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