Sitecore Search: Enhancing Search Relevancy with Semantic Search Ranking

In today’s digital-first world, delivering highly relevant search results is crucial to providing exceptional user experiences. Semantic search ranking takes search capabilities to the next level by understanding the context and intent behind a user’s query, rather than relying solely on keyword matching. This approach not only improves relevancy but also enhances user engagement by presenting results that truly align with their needs. This blog explores how Sitecore Search leverages semantic search to deliver smarter, more accurate results.

Prerequisites: Semantic Search is not enabled by default in Sitecore Search. To activate this feature, you’ll need to raise a support ticket with Sitecore, specifying the fields you want included in the semantic search.

Once Semantic Search feature is enabled, you can get semantically sorted results by adding the +semsearch attribute within the rfk_flags section of your request, as shown in the example below.

curl --location 'https://discover.sitecorecloud.io/discover/v2/<DOMAIN_ID>' \
--header 'accept-encoding: gzip, deflate, br' \
--header 'content-type: application/json' \
--header 'authorization: <API_KEY>' \
--header 'accept: application/json' \
--data '{
"widget": {
"items": [
{
"rfk_id": "rfkid_7",
"entity": "content",
"search": {
"content": {
"fields": [
"description",
"tags"
]
},
"query": {
"keyphrase": "Ultra-high bandwidth network"
}
},
"rfk_flags": [
"+semsearch"
]

}
]
},
"context": {
"locale": {
"country": "us",
"language": "en"
}
}
}'

Here is an example that demonstrates how search results are ranked better with semantic search by understanding the search intent,

Without Semantic Search,

With Semantic Search!

NOTE: Semantic Search in Sitecore Search doesn’t perform the traditional vector search as of now. Instead, it retrieves results using keyword matching and applies semantic ranking if the +semsearch flag is included in the request.

Here’s to smarter, more relevant search results!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *