Once you have created a match strategy, it will not have any effect until you associate the match strategy with an area or a rule.
Match Strategy Name
This name is used in the Match Strategy selector dropdown in Rules and Area pages or with the matchStrategyName field in the search API.
Partial Match Rule
Define your matching strategy in this section.
You can set how many terms must match for a given search. E.g., if you set a strategy that requires that 2 out of 3 terms must match, then within a search for a “tall narrow box” will bring products that contain “tall box”, “tall narrow”, and “narrow box”, as well as those that contain “tall narrow box”. If you set it to be 3 out of 3 must match, then all 3 terms will be required to be present within a given result.
You can also set the strategy as a percent of terms that must match, so that you can easily define the long-tail strategy.
Default Match Strategy
The default match strategy is:
| Number of terms searched | Number of terms that must match |
|---|---|
| 2 | 2 |
| 3 | 2 |
| 4 | 2 |
| 5 | 3 |
| 6 | 4 |
| 7 | 4 |
| 8 | 5 |
| 9 and more | 60% |
It is important to define a general match strategy for your site based on your business requirements.
After you create your general match strategy, you must set it as the default for the area under Area Management > Edit > Default Match Strategy.
Relaxed Match Strategy
For multi-term search queries that do not return results with the original match strategy, the search engine is able to fall back to a more relaxed match strategy in order to bring back results. This can be configured in [Area Management][/gb-docs/admin/area-mgmnt] by a Command Center administrator.
The default relaxed match strategy will remove one term that must match from whichever strategy was used in the query. However, users can select a custom relaxed match strategy provided that it is already created in the area.
For example, if you use the Default Match Strategy above and get no results back, the following will be used as the Relaxed Match Strategy:
| Number of terms searched | Number of terms that must match |
|---|---|
| 2 | 1 |
| 3 | 1 |
| 4 | 1 |
| 5 | 2 |
| 6 | 3 |
| 7 | 3 |
| 8 | 4 |
| 9 and more | 60% |