Excluded Results
A mechanism that prevents certain products from appearing in search results, regardless of their relevance or the search query.
Definition
Definition
A store’s search engine returns results based on relevance: it matches what the user types against the catalog data and displays the best matches. Exclusions intentionally break that logic. They are explicit instructions telling the search engine, “this product must never appear,” no matter how closely it matches the query.
Technically, exclusions act as a blacklist that is applied after matching and before the results are displayed. They are useful for managing the brand experience: for example, a fashion store can temporarily exclude items from a previous collection so that the search engine prioritizes the new collection without modifying the catalog itself.
What it's used for
What it's used for
They make it possible to handle business situations where a product should not be shown even though it remains in the catalog: suspended commercial agreements, discontinued products that have not yet been removed from the feed, or items reserved for other sales channels.
Doofinder
Doofinder includes “Excluded Results” within the promotional tools available in the administration panel. There are two ways to use it:
- Individual item exclusion: search for a product directly and add it to the blacklist. The limit is 100 individual items per search engine.
- Rule-based exclusion: create conditions based on feed attributes. Rules support AND logic (two different attributes that must both be met) and OR logic (multiple values for the same attribute, any of which will trigger the exclusion). Both conditions can be combined within a single rule. For example, exclude all products in the “Shoes” category whose color is either “blue” or “red.”
For rule-based exclusions to work, the attribute used in the rule must exist in the feed and be configured as a filter, although it does not need to be visible in the search results layer.
Example
Case study
An electronics store has 15 headphone models from a brand with which it has suspended its commercial agreement. The products remain in the feed because the ERP integration is not updated until the end of the quarter.
Without exclusions, a user searching for “wireless headphones” will see those models among the top results because their price and ratings are competitive. If the user tries to buy them, they may find that the products are unavailable or out of stock, creating frustration.
With an exclusion rule based on brand = “BrandX”, all of those products disappear from search results immediately, without needing to modify the catalog or wait for the next feed synchronization.
References