By Ziffity Solutions LLC

05/12/2016 On-Site Search for any eCommerce application is very vital as it is found that 60% of the users leave the site after a poor search experience. Oracle Endeca Commerce is an eCommerce search engine that is renowned to provide personalized search experience and is a pioneer of the faceted search feature that helps users to get to the exact product they are looking for. Oracle Endeca Commerce brings to the table the following features which makes it a leader among all other search engine providers.

• MDEX Engine – High performing stateless search engine. The official Endeca documentation describes the power of stateless design as “The stateless design of the MDEX Engine facilitates the addition of MDEX Engine servers for load balancing and redundancy. Because the MDEX Engine is stateless, any replica of an MDEX Engine on one server can reply to queries independently of a replica on other MDEX Engine servers.”
  
• Data modeling or the logical organization of data is made simple. It’s designed as “load and go”, with little up-front data modeling and a design optimized for agile data discovery across disparate and uneven data sources.
  
• Scalable multi-site architecture that leverages content and data from any source and not limited to product catalog.
  
• Integrated SEO, search and guided navigation capabilities that make it easy for customers to find the site and what they are looking for on the site.
  
• Excellent Linguistic analysis – Uses analytic tools such as Latin-1, Rosette Based Linguistics and Oracle Language Technology (OLT) together providing best in class stemming, decompounding and word tokenization.
  
• Internationalization – eCommerce is global and Oracle Endeca Commerce supports 36 languages in its latest version (11.2).
  
• Ability to deliver content based promotion, by triggering rules against the content presented. Content can be anything from products to third party documents based on what is present in the search index.
  
• With Endeca User segments, personalized search experiences that are tailored specifically to an individual’s interests based on recent actions, behavioral profile can be implemented.
  

Basics of Oracle Endeca Commerce

Image Source: https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E28906_01/Common.622/pdf/EndecaConceptsGuide.pdf
Oracle Endeca Commerce has three basic components

1. Endeca Information Transformation Layer (ITL) – Interprets source data and converts it into a set of Oracle Endeca MDEX Engine indices. This involves content acquisition, forge and Dgidx processes and the end result is an Endeca index which possesses enriched source data with enhanced Search & Guided Navigation capabilities.
   
2. Endeca MDEX Engine – Consists of the Indexer (Dgidx), the Dgraph, and the Agraph. The MDEX Engine stores the indices generated by the Dgidx indexing program of the Endeca Information Transformation Layer. It is comprised of proprietary data structures and algorithms that allows it to provide real time responses to user queries.
   
3. Endeca Application Tier – The front end application from which the MDEX engine receives search requests to be processed by it.
   

Search plus Merchandising: Searchandising
Oracle Endeca Experience Manager empowers business users with complete control over merchandising with its ability to target customers based on the search terms or refinements they have selected. Business users create web pages, layouts & rules similar to a web content management system, configure data to be presented on the pages based on search terms, navigation state (refinements selected), thereby promoting content based on customer behavior on the site. With Oracle Endeca Experience Manager, a business user can:

• Automate merchandising by using global rules without the need to lookout for customer path or engage IT
  
• Manually place merchandising and promotions for higher-value opportunities
  
• Create landing pages for category and sub-categories with promotions highlighting the corresponding category
  
• Govern presentation of page layout, search results and decide how cross channel content must be placed
  
• Define contextual recommendations, based on customer selections
  
• Modify experiences on content shown on various devices and platforms
  

Whether you own a B2B or B2C business, Oracle Endeca Commerce can make a remarkable change in your online presence and on-site search, empowering your customers to quickly discover the content, engage them with guided navigation and enable personalized experience with targeted promotions and recommendations.