Server-side product indexing and search

Summary

Server-side product similarity indexing and search is the 2nd of the 4 sub-tasks of the Project:Personalized_Search funded by the NGI0 Discovery Fund managed by NlNet.

This page documents the progress made in Q2 2020.

Overview

Diagram source: https://vecta.io/app/edit/-M2XyVv8ZoaLNrW-zQoT

1 The Open Food Facts mobile app (and 3rd party apps) make generic search requests that do not contain user preferences 1 The server returns a big number of generic results 1 The app uses the user preferences stored locally to personalize the search results

Functional specs

Search API

The search API is called by the app to retrieve a high number of generic search results (products) that match a query.

Match (required)

The search query needs to contain at least one required criteria.

Here are potential criteria that we could consider:

Match on category

The query specifies a category tag (e.g. en:cookies).

Optional filters

The search query can contain filters to restrict

Technical specs