Results

As Fredhopper Suggest is a separate module, which is offered in addition to the standard Fredhopper Access Server (FAS), it uses its own data index. Fredhopper Suggest will only connect to FAS to establish the number of results that each term will lead to and no further connection exists between the two services.

Fredhopper Suggest is not directly accessing Fredhopper to determine the current search results but is rather building its own indexes that cache the number of results per search term and updating that number from time to time. If you frequently update your Fredhopper instance with attributes that affect the search result, it is possible that the Fredhopper Suggest does not instantly reflect the latest information. The frequency of updates can be controlled in the configuration and is set to refresh one search term every 15 seconds by default. 

Fredhopper Suggest also uses a specific location when establishing the number of search results for a term which is the same as the scope for that searchterm. Please ensure that this location contains all the restrictions you apply on you search. For example, if you restrict by country (such a //catalog01/en_GB/country=UK), you have to ensure that the same restriction is set in the scope section of the query string instead of it being sent with the scope //catalog01/en_GB only. 

When using product suggestions served by Fredhopper Suggest, you might notice that the ranking of the Suggest products differs from the ranking of actual search result pages. The reason for this is that Fredhopper Suggest implements its own specific ranking rules during the index generation which might not exactly match the configuration within FAS. The same also applies to the sorting of the results once they have been determined as well because the default is to show them in alphabetical order. Please contact your Fredhopper Technical Consultant to discuss making any required changes to these areas.