Understand how Cut+Dry's search works

Overview

Our order guide and catalog search is designed to help you find the right products quickly—even if you don’t type the exact name or code. Here’s a simple breakdown of how search works, what it looks at, and how results are ranked.

What information does the search look at?

When you search, we compare your query against multiple product details, including:

• Item code
• Product name (combined with item code)
• GTIN / UPC
• Brand name
• Manufacturer name
• Search keywords (common terms and aliases)
• Categories (platform and vendor-defined)
  • Top-level through detailed categories
  • Rosetta category names (if enabled) (Cut+Dry proprietary taxonomy)
  • Vendor category and subcategory names (if Rosetta is not enabled)

This allows the search to work whether you enter a product name, brand, code, or category.

How your search query is interpreted

Your search is split into individual terms based on spaces.

Each product must meet one of the following criteria to appear in the results:

1. Exact match (stricter) - 90% of your search terms must appear exactly (or as direct substrings) in the product data.
2. Fuzzy match (more flexible) - 75% of your search terms must appear, allowing for:
   1. Misspellings
   2. Singular/plural variations
   3. Close word matches

This helps surface relevant products even if the spelling isn’t perfect. For each search term, we automatically check both singular and plural forms. This ensures you don’t miss products based on word form.

How results are ranked

Once matching products are identified, results are ranked by relevance. The better your terms match important fields, the higher the product appears.

Exact match boosts

Exact matches receive the strongest boost:

• Exact word match: +10
• Substring match (part of a word): +2
• Substring match of singular/plural variation: +1

Fuzzy match boosts

Fuzzy matches still contribute to ranking, but with a lower weight, ensuring exact matches are prioritized whenever possible.

Field importance 

Some fields are more important than others. Matches in these fields carry more weight:

This means entering an item code, or GTIN, will usually return the most precise results.

Inventory & status boosts

To keep results practical and actionable, we adjust rankings based on product status:

• Active items: boosted higher
• In-stock items: boosted higher
• Non–special order items: slightly boosted
• Special order items: neutral
• Discontinued items: heavily deprioritized

This helps ensure the most order-ready products appear first.

Brand boosting (optional)

If brand boosting is enabled, you can influence search results by prioritizing or deprioritizing specific brands:

• Boost a brand → Results rank higher
• Down-rank a brand → Results rank lower

This allows you to tailor search results to preferred suppliers or house brands. Learn more about brand boosting here.