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Search & Indexing

Sokobuni uses Algolia to power product search on your storefront. Products are indexed automatically when created or updated, giving customers fast, typo-tolerant search.

How indexing works

When you create or update a product, a background workflow runs within ~30 seconds:

  1. The product data is fetched (title, description, tags, categories, price, status)
  2. It's transformed into an Algolia record
  3. The record is pushed to your store's Algolia index

Products set to Draft or with no published variants are not indexed — they won't appear in search.

Triggering a manual sync

If search results are out of date (e.g. after bulk imports or database migrations), you can trigger a full re-sync from the admin panel. Look for an Algolia Settings or Search page in your sidebar, or contact your platform administrator to run a sync.

🔥Important

Algolia has a 10KB per-record size limit. Very long product descriptions can cause sync failures. If a product isn't appearing in search, check if its description is unusually long and trim it.

Improving search relevance

Better product titles: Algolia ranks exact and partial matches on the title highest. Use the words your customers actually search for.

Tags: Add searchable tags to your products (in the product form). These are indexed and improve discovery.

Categories: Customers can filter by category on the search page. Assigning products to the right categories improves their discoverability.

What's indexed

Each product record includes:

  • title, description, handle
  • thumbnail URL
  • Category names and IDs
  • Tags
  • Variants (price, currency)
  • status (only published products)

What's not indexed

  • Customer data
  • Order history
  • Inventory levels (out-of-stock products still appear in search results)
💡Tip

Your Algolia index name is set during store configuration. If you need to check it (e.g. for a custom integration), contact your platform administrator — it's stored in your backend environment variables.

Algolia API keys

Your storefront uses an Algolia Search-Only API key for client-side search — this key is safe to expose in the browser because it only allows reading indexed data, not writing. It's configured in your storefront's environment variables during setup.

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Search & Indexing — Sokobuni Learn