Google Commerce Search Migration to Solr

Historical Emporium provides an online storefront selling authentic costume clothing and products. Due to discontinuation of Google Commerce Search, Historical Emporium sought to replace Google Commerce Search for its search, navigation and merchandising functionality. After a review of available alternatives (with Innovent's guidance), they chose Apache Solr and engaged Innovent to complete the project. Project services included:

• Search, navigation and merchandising best practices consultation
• Solr installation, configuration, and tuning
• High performance data ingestion development
• Website configuration, including:
  • Taxonomy-driven navigation
  • Faceted refinements of search results
  • User-driven sort options
  • Pagination
  • Breadcrumbs
  • Grid layout
  • Search-as-you-type suggestions driven by Solr
  • Configurable facets (show, hide and ordering)
  • Redirect behavior
• Knowledge transfer so that staff can maintain the solution
• Go-Live support and a Post-production assessment

Key Outcomes

The key outcomes of the project were essentially a one-for-one replacement of key functionality that the client required and was accustomed to with GCS. Many improvements were made most notably related to indexing performance. GCS would take up to 8 hours to renew an index, and wipe out the previous index while doing so, such that for an hour or so, the catalogue online would be incomplete. The Solr indexing process takes less than a minute, and never let's the online catalogue sit incomplete. The Solr indexing process is executed on a daily schedule and can also be done on-demand. Innovent implemented search as you type that includes product thumbnails and blazing fast performance. Merchandising features such as facet visibility and ordering, as well as custom redirect behavior were also implemented.