Elasticsearch Search Quality & Module Consolidation

Challenge

A flagship product was appearing at position 3 in search results when customers searched for its exact product name, with two less relevant products ranked above it. The e-commerce team had escalated the issue as it was directly affecting conversion on one of their top-selling SKUs.

What Was Built

Root cause: individual products had been assigned custom Elasticsearch search weights (product_search_weight attribute) during a past configuration exercise, causing competing products to score higher than exact-match products for the same query. Rather than patching the three affected custom Elasticsearch integration modules in isolation, the overlapping logic was consolidated into a clean single module, eliminating duplicated overrides. Fixed sort order for both search results and autocomplete suggestions. Multiple search query manipulations in the Elasticsearch client to improve relevance scoring overall.