How to remove products from Suggest

Scope:

This entails removing items from Suggest Search, so that end users will not receive suggestions for products to purchase that may not presently be available.

Context:

If a particular item runs out of stock, or especially if an item is no longer sold by a vendor, it would be misrepresentative of present stock levels, as well as misleading to the potential end user to continue to suggest it when they are searching for something on the site. Therefore, it should be removed from all parts of Fredhopper, including FAS and Suggest.

Solution:

Removing products from Suggest simply involves triggering a new reindex of Suggest. This can be done by uploading a new trigger to Search Suggest. This will cause Suggest to re-index based on your current FAS data. As a result of this, the items intended to be removed from Suggest should first be removed from the FAS upload data. A full data re-index must be run to remove the item(s) in question, and this can be either manual or automatic (set to run at a given time of day. Instructions for how to configure this can be found here). Once this process has completed, triggering a re-index for Suggest will remove the item(s) from suggestions as well.

Cloud Customers: The most recently generated FAS XML files from a full re-index are used as input for Suggest.
On-premise Customers: The data uploaded from your side is used as input for Suggest.

This page contains instructions on how to update Suggest via the REST API. This trigger can be generated at the user's convenience, lending to greater flexibility. Scroll down to Section 2.2: Updating the Suggest Index. Also, be sure to clear front-end cache of prior suggestions.