Live Search Faceting Improvements: 100 Buckets Maximum

August 7, 2024 brought significant improvements to Live Search's faceting capabilities. The platform now supports up to 100 buckets (values) per facet and price ranges extending to 40 million, enabling merchants with large, complex catalogues to offer granular product filtering without architectural constraints.

What Are Facets?

Facets are the filtering options visible on search results pages: brand, colour, size, price range, etc. Users click facet values to narrow results. Rich, well-designed faceting improves product discoverability and helps customers find exactly what they're seeking.

The 100 Bucket Enhancement

Previously, Live Search limited facets to smaller bucket counts, constraining how granularly merchants could categorise products. The new 100-bucket limit enables much richer filtering:

Fashion merchants can now expose granular size ranges, colour options, and brand selections. Home goods merchants can filter by material, style, brand, and price. Electronics merchants can filter by processor, RAM, storage, and dozens of other specifications. This richer filtering improves customer experience and often increases conversion by helping customers find perfect matches faster.

Extended Price Ranges

The price range extension to 40 million enables luxury merchants to filter incredibly expensive items without workarounds. Jewellery merchants, premium home furnishings retailers, and high-end goods sellers can now offer granular price filtering across their entire catalogue.

Performance Considerations

Increasing bucket counts does impact performance slightly. Adobe optimised Live Search to handle increased complexity efficiently, but merchants should test faceting configurations on production data to ensure acceptable performance. In most cases, performance remains excellent even with maximum bucket counts.

Strategic Implications

These improvements demonstrate Adobe's commitment to enabling merchants to build sophisticated, conversion-optimised search experiences. By removing technical constraints, merchants can focus on UX strategy rather than working around platform limitations.