UpStart Commerce Search
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OpenSearch Concepts in NoChannel Search

1min

OpenSearch is a powerful search and analytics engine that serves as the backbone of NoChannel Search capabilities. Before diving into its concepts, it's essential to understand foundational OpenSearch components.

  • OpenSearch Index: This serves as a container for data, settings, and mappings. It stores and organizes documents, each of which represents a single unit of indexed data. For example, an index named "products" could contain documents representing various apparel items.
  • Document: A document is a single unit of stored and indexed data within an OpenSearch index. It consists of fields with corresponding values. In an apparel context, a document could represent a specific product, with fields like "name," "description," "price," and "brand."
  • Lucene Index: OpenSearch internally uses Lucene, a high-performance, full-featured text search engine library. Lucene creates inverted indices from documents, facilitating efficient searching and retrieval of data.
  • Index Mapping: An index mapping defines the mapping between document fields and the corresponding Lucene index. It specifies how each field should be analyzed and indexed for search operations. For instance, in an apparel index, the "price" field may be mapped as a numeric field for range queries.
  • OpenSearch Search Payload: This encompasses the various components of a search request, including the query, boosting or burying of certain results, aggregations for data analysis, pagination for navigating large result sets, sorting criteria, and suggestions or type-ahead functionality. An example payload for an apparel search could include a query for "shirts," along with pagination parameters to retrieve the first 10 results.
  • OpenSearch Search Response: The search response includes the results or hits matching the query, along with their relevance scores. Additionally, it may include aggregations providing insights into the distribution of data across different dimensions. In an apparel search response, relevant products matching the query "shirts" would be returned, along with any requested aggregations like brand distribution.

Understanding these core components of OpenSearch is essential for leveraging NoChannel Search's capabilities effectively in various applications.