Safe Search

Introduction

If your e-commerce site has a diverse catalog, including age-restricted items such tobacco, alcohol, and sexual health products, you may not want those age-restricted items to appear in product search results, unless explicitly searched.

For example, suppose a customer searches for “cinnamon” on a grocery site and sees the following search results:

Although all three items technically match the search criteria, it’s likely that the user’s intent is more “family-friendly” and that they don’t want to see alcohol in the search results. However, if the user had explicitly searched for “cinnamon whisky”, it would make sense for the Fireball product to be shown.

In this article, we’ll discuss how Miso’s Search Engine can be fine-tuned to allow for context-switching between “family-friendly” and “adult” products.

Do it with APIs

To enable Safe Search on your Search Engine, you will need to provide your Miso Support team with a .csv file containing a list of categories that contain “adult” products. And stay tuned - Safe Search management is an upcoming update to Dojo.

Next, set the enable_safe_search parameter to true in your API request body.

From our previous example, a customer searches for “cinnamon”, but with Safe Search enabled, only products in the “pantry” and “breakfast” category are returned.

//Sample Request
POST /v1/search/search
{
    "q" : "cinnamon",
    "user_id" : "user-123",
    "enable_safe_search" : true
}

//Sample Response
{
    "data" : {
        "products" : [
            {
                "product_id" : "mccormick_grnd_cinnamon"
                "categories" : ["Pantry", "Spices and Seasonings"]
            },
            {
                "product_id" : "pillsbury_cinnamon_rolls_original"
                "categories" : ["Breakfast", "Donuts and Pastries"]
            },
            {
                "product_id" : "kellogg_pop_tarts_cinnamon"
                "categories" : ["Breakfast", "Donuts and Pastries"]
            }
        ],
        "total" : 10
    }
}

On the other hand, if the customer searches for “cinnamon whisky”, they will see the relevant product, even with Safe Search enabled.

//Sample Request
POST /v1/search/search
{
    "q" : "cinnamon whisky",
    "user_id" : "user-123",
    "enable_safe_search" : true
}

//Sample Response
{
    "data" : {
        "products" : [
            {
                "product_id" : "fireball_hot_cinnamon_whisky"
                "categories" : ["Beer, Wine, and Liquor", "Spirits and Liquor"]
            }
        ],
        "total" : 1
    }
}

Additional Resources

For more information on Miso’s Recommendation API, check out the official API Documentation.

For more recipes like this, visit the Recipes page on our Docs site.

Published Date: April 1st, 2022