'How can I aggregate search results in Algolia by three different criteria and sort them in a specific way?

Apologies in advance, as I'm not a native English speaker! I'll try to be as clear as possible with what I'm trying to do:

I'm using Algolia InstantSearch in Angular in a marketplace website to provide my users with a search widget. I've been tasked with having results displayed following this logic:

  1. Top result: Best reviewed product
  2. Second result: Most purchased product
  3. Third result: Most recently published product

This "block" should repeat as long as there's results, so the fourth result would need to be the second best reviewed product, fifth would be the second most purchased, third the second most recently published product, and so on. This has the intention of allowing new sellers in the marketplace to get exposure, while rewarding those that have sold the most and had better reviews for their products simultaneously.

Is this possible in some way using Algolia? I've read the documentation on custom ranking (https://www.algolia.com/doc/guides/managing-results/must-do/custom-ranking/) and exhaustive sorting (https://www.algolia.com/doc/guides/managing-results/refine-results/sorting/in-depth/exhaustive-sort/) and I've only found how to set different ranking criteria which are applied one after the other with tie-breakers, but no information at all about how I might achieve this.

algolia


Solution 1:[1]

As you've discovered with Algolia, sorting occurs within the index itself. To sort by different criteria you create a replica of your index with different sorting criteria.

So you'd have a primary index + 3 replicas sorted by reviews, purchases, and date.

  • my_index
  • my_index-reviews-descending
  • my_index-purchase-descending
  • my_index-added-descending

You'll use the multi-index query to get results from all three replicas simultaneously: https://www.algolia.com/doc/guides/building-search-ui/ui-and-ux-patterns/multi-index-search/angular/

Also, don't forget that to sort by date you'll want to out your dates as Unix timestamps. More info here: https://www.algolia.com/doc/guides/managing-results/refine-results/sorting/how-to/sort-an-index-by-date/

Sources

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Source: Stack Overflow

Solution Source
Solution 1 Chuck Meyer

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