Server-side product indexing and search - Technical Specs

Summary

This page contains the technical specifications for the Server-side product indexing and search task of the Project:Personalized_Search project.

It lists the options we are considering and the one we choose.

Server-side sort order pre-computation

The current API returns results sorted by last modified date.

For the Personalized Search project, we will pre-compute for each product a query independent sort key based on:

• data completeness: how much key data we have for the product
• data quality: how confident we are that the data is correct and up-to-date
• product quality: how high is the overall quality of the product (e.g. nutritional quality)
• product popularity: how popular the product is

The search API will return a large number of products (e.g. 100 products) that match the query and order them with this pre-computed key.

The Products::compute_sort_keys() function computes the popularity_key key.

Search API

Search by category

Currently working:

• https://fr.openfoodfacts.org/cgi/search.pl?action=process&tagtype_0=categories&tag_contains_0=contains&tag_0=en%3Acookies&sort_by=popularity_key&page_size=20&action=display

Possible change of syntax for filters:

• categories=some category name, or categories=en:some-category-id

Search by keyword

Currently working:

• https://fr.openfoodfacts.org/cgi/search.pl?action=process&search_terms=soda&sort_by=popularity_key&page_size=20&action=display&json=1