Seeking Advice: Implementing a Two-Step Dynamic Faceting Approach in Vertex AI Search for Retail

[pavlodidushko]

Hi Google Cloud Community,

I’m working on enhancing our retail search experience using Vertex AI Search for Retail and facing challenges with dynamic faceting. I’d like to share our current approach and seek your advice or suggestions on optimizing it further.

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The Challenge

In our product catalog, we handle a wide range of categories. Facet keys that work well for one query (e.g., "bearings") may not be relevant for others (e.g., "shirts" or "food"). Static facet configurations or precomputed attributes often result in irrelevant or overly broad filtering options, negatively impacting the user experience. Also count of facets are over 4000, exceeds limit 200.

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Our Current Approach: A Two-Step Process

To address this, we’ve implemented a two-step search process:

1. Step 1: Retrieve Relevant Facet Keys

   • Perform an initial search with the user query to extract relevant facet keys dynamically.
   • Focus on the top N results (e.g., top 50) and analyze their attributes to determine the most frequent and contextually relevant facet keys.

2. Step 2: Perform the Actual Product Search

   • Use the original query and apply the facet keys extracted in Step 1.
   • The second search returns both the final product list and the dynamic facets tailored to the user’s query.

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The Problem

While this approach improves relevance, it feels inefficient to perform two searches for every query. Additionally, configuring the dynamicFacetSpec in Vertex AI Search doesn’t seem to work as expected—facet keys are not generated dynamically based on the user query. Instead, we still get a predefined set of facet keys, which limits flexibility.

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Questions

1. DynamicFacetSpec Usage:
   How can I configure dynamicFacetSpec in Vertex AI Search to dynamically generate facet keys based on the query context?

2. Performance Optimization:
   Are there ways to reduce the overhead of performing two searches while still maintaining the benefits of dynamic faceting? HOW TO DO IMPLEMENT THIS FEATURE WITH ONLY ONE SEARCH??? ( This is what I have been investigating... Please...)

3. Best Practices:
   Are there any recommended practices or alternative approaches for handling dynamic faceting in a diverse product catalog?
   Thank you so much.