Search Articles

Introduction

For news and publishing sites, search quality depends on more than matching the query. A reader searching for "elections", "climate", or "football" often expects recent articles, currently popular stories, and content that fits their reading habits.

Recombee’s personalized news search combines the search query with article freshness, trendingness, and user preferences to create a more engaging discovery experience.

Scenario Setup

In the Recombee Admin UI, navigate to the Scenarios section and choose Create Scenario.

1. Enter a Scenario ID, such as "search"
2. Choose Recommendation type - Search Items

Logic

The Logic defines the behavior of the recommendation engine.

• Choose the news:search logic type from the News models to get smart full-text search optimized for searching news articles.

This Logic lets you balance multiple ranking signals:

Freshness Impact

• freshnessWeight controls how much recently published articles are prioritized.
• freshnessDateProperty specifies the item property that stores the article publication date.

For news sites, we recommend setting freshnessDateProperty to the property that contains the article publication date, such as publishedAt or datePublished.

Trendingness Impact

• trendingnessWeight controls how much currently trending articles affect the ranking.
• trendingnessPeriod defines the time window used to calculate trendingness.

Personalization Impact

• personalizationWeight controls how much the results are personalized for the individual reader.

Other Parameters

• allowEmptyQueryFallback controls what happens when the search query is empty. When enabled, Recombee can return personalized recommendations instead of an empty result list.

Requesting Search Results

1. No-Code Widget - create a Quick Search No-Code Widget using the visual editor in the Admin UI.
2. Widget SDKs - use the Quick Search SDK for vanilla JavaScript or React to create a search widget with the design of your choice.
3. API SDK - request the Search Items endpoint of the Recombee API using an SDK of your choice.

For more information, navigate to the Integration tab of the Scenario in the Admin UI.