How does the Product Search work?
How Product Search
Works in CMS Max
Built on PostgreSQL full-text search, CMS Max delivers fast, relevant results across your entire product catalog — with intelligent ranking so shoppers always find what they're looking for.
What Gets Indexed
Every field is weighted — higher-ranked fields push matching products to the top of results.
Highest relevance — exact matches here rank first in results.
Strong supporting signal — brand searches and category browsing route here.
Broad content matching — surfaces products with rich descriptions.
How Ranking Works
Results aren't random — they're scored and ordered by a set of intelligent signals.
Exact title match
Searching "Blue Dream" will immediately surface products with that exact title at the top.
Brand & category match
Searching a brand name like "Wyld" returns every product from that brand, ranked by title relevance within the brand.
Tag & type match
Tags like "organic," "vegan," or "gluten-free" are fully searchable so shoppers can find products by attribute.
Description & content match
Product descriptions and page content are searched last — great for detailed queries that don't match any structured field.
Recency as a tiebreaker
When two products have equal relevance scores, newer products appear first.
Two Ways to Search
CMS Max has two distinct search experiences, each optimized for its context.
Accessed at /search?q=… — searches across your entire store simultaneously.
- ✓ Products
- ✓ Pages & blog posts
- ✓ Events & locations
- ✓ Job openings
Accessed at /shop?q=… — laser-focused on your product catalog with advanced filtering.
- ✓ Price range filtering
- ✓ Brand & category filters
- ✓ In-stock filter
- ✓ Sort by price, relevance, newest
Advanced Query Syntax
CMS Max supports natural-language search operators for power users and store admins.
Built for Performance
Search results are fast because the heavy lifting happens at index time, not query time.
Result cache per query keeps repeat searches instant
Generalized Inverted Index — PostgreSQL's fastest text search structure
Content types searched simultaneously in site-wide search
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