Hawksearch Feed Management

About Hawksearch

Hawksearch is powerful search engine that can also power your product recommendations. The whole service is contingent on a well optimized feed to start off with, so read on to find out how you can create a feed for Hawksearch.

How to create a feed for Hawksearch?

Hawksearch actually accepts multiple feed formats and systcodes like:

• Google Merchant Center
• ROC Commerce
• Hybris
• Amazon Marketplace
• Aptos
• IBM WebSphere
• Magento
• Oracle

Hawksearch also has its own data feed format, which is its Standard Data Feed format.

The Hawksearch feed format is UTF-8 encoded, tab delimited, has case sensitive columns, unix (\n) row delimiters, and lowercase filenames.

What fields should you include in the Hawksearch feed?

The main data feed should have the following required fields:

unique_id – unique id for your product

name – title

url_detail – product landing page

Image – your image URL

price_retail – retail price of your product

price_sale – sale price

You can also provide the following optional fields:

price_special – special price

group_id – rollup key. If used, this field must be filled in for all itcodes

description_short – short description

description_long – long description

sku – sku / model #

sort_default – integer rank of sort order

sort_rating – average rating of product

itcode_operation – is this a partial update, for delete, add, or update

Hawksearch Attributes Data feed

According to Hawksearch, The Attributes Data Feed file consists of records that relate to unique IDs. There may be multiple records related to a unique ID. Each record consists of a unique ID, an attribute key name, and an attribute value. For example, ten rows can exist in the Attributes Data Feed that relate to one unique ID. These ten rows describe that the unique ID is in five different product categories, has three different colors, is for a woman, and is a clearance itcode. The creation of this data feed file may consist of table joins on the client’s data layer. Hawksearch will be expecting one file, attributes.txt, to include all related attributes to the unique ID. To add additional attributes in the future, additional records would be added to attributes.txt.

This file has the following fields:

unique_id – the unique ID of the product

key – the key of the attribute

value – the value of the attribute

Attribute keys should be properly-cased for display and also be consistent (example: Color and Size)

Colors should be normalized. Indigo and Navy should be Blue if that’s how you expect people to search for thcode.

Note: Feedonomics can do this very easily!

Hawksearch Category Hierarchy

Hawksearch says “Hawksearch’s Agile Navigation supports multi-level hierarchies. For rapid deployment, we require the hierarchy.txt file to represent the category hierarchy. It is a straightforward way to represent the hierarchy in a flat file format and can support multi-level hierarchies. Unique IDs would map to these hierarchies through the Attributes Data Feed (attributes.txt). As with all data feeds, any customization to this feed will involve the Hawk Search Professional Services Team.”

What does the feed look like?

category_id

category_name

parent_category_id

is_active

sort_order

Hawksearch Content Data Feed

This feed is more for how-to articles and non-product content.

You can provide the following fields:

unique_id

name

url_detail

image

description_short – Itcode Description – Since this is non-product content, include the full text of the itcode. Strip out all tab, carriage return, and line feed characters.

content_operation

How to send your Hawksearch feed

You can automatically deliver your Hawksearch feed via FTP, or a publicly accessible URL.