Freshness

What is Freshness?

Freshness covers both index freshness (how quickly data changes reach the index) and ranking freshness (how recency and recent signals affect scores). It ensures shoppers see current items, prices, and availability—and that new content gets fair visibility.

How It Works (quick)

• Index freshness: Connectors/webhooks/CDC push deltas (price, stock, content) to the index; re-crawl or reprocess as needed.
• Signals: last_modified, publish_date, inventory_age, recent CTR/conv, review recency.
• Ranking: Time-decay boosts for new arrivals, trending items, or recently updated content; caps to protect relevance.
• Scheduling: SLAs for sync (e.g., price/stock ≤5 min; content daily); priority queues.

Why It Matters in E-commerce

• Trust: No out-of-date prices or OOS items at the top.
• Discovery: New arrivals and fresh guides surface promptly.
• Revenue: Reacts to trends and campaigns in near real time.

Best Practices

• Delta-first pipelines: Webhooks/CDC over polling; idempotent upserts; tombstones for deletes.
• Per-category decay: Fashion may need stronger recency than appliances.
• Guardrails: Cap freshness boosts; never outrank clearly irrelevant items.
• Cache strategy: Short TTLs on hot endpoints; purge on critical updates.
• Monitoring: Lag dashboards for price/stock/content; alarms on missed SLAs.

Challenges

• Over-boosting “new” hurts evergreen quality; noisy updates can churn caches; time zone and clock skew issues.

Examples

• New-product boost for 14 days with gradual decay.
• Trending lift from recent CTR/conversions—capped and de-biased.
• Immediate demotion of OOS items until restock.

Summary

Freshness keeps your search honest and timely. Sync deltas fast, apply sensible time-decay boosts, cap their impact, and monitor lag so shoppers always see current, high-quality results.