Coveo - Cloud Based Search

Coveo is a powerful and advanced cloud-based search and relevance platform designed to empower organizations to deliver highly personalized and engaging search and recommendation experiences. Whether you’re running a website, an e-commerce store, a customer service portal, or managing internal enterprise systems, Coveo helps businesses connect users with the most relevant content, products, or information — all based on their intent and context. 

Coveo was created to solve one of the biggest challenges in the digital world: how to deliver truly relevant information to users quickly and efficiently. As the amount of data and content exploded online, traditional search engines struggled to keep up with user expectations for fast, personalized, and intuitive search experiences 

This is why Coveo was built — to bring artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning into the search experience. By understanding user behavior, preferences, and context, Coveo dramatically improves the relevance of search results, helping businesses increase engagement, reduce frustration, and drive more conversions.

In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, providing users with immediate access to the right information or products is no longer a luxury — it’s a necessity. Coveo addresses this need by enabling companies to unify data from multiple sources, apply advanced AI-driven relevance models, and continuously learn from user interactions to deliver smarter, faster search experiences.

Apache Solr

SAP Hybris (now SAP Commerce Cloud) comes with Apache Solr as its default search engine. While Solr is powerful and flexible, it also presents some challenges that can impact businesses trying to deliver fast, personalized, and relevant search experiences:

•  Solr requires significant technical expertise to configure and maintain within the SAP Hybris environment. Hybris developers often need to spend a lot of time tuning Solr’s complex schema, handling indexing strategies, and managing the infrastructure. This can slow down project timelines and increase operational costs.

• Personalization and AI capabilities are limited with the out-of-the-box Solr setup in Hybris. Solr doesn’t automatically learn from user behavior or adapt search results based on context. This means additional development effort is needed to build machine learning models or integrate third-party AI tools to achieve relevance that modern users expect.

• Scaling and managing search infrastructure can be a challenge, especially during high-traffic sales events or product launches. Solr requires dedicated resources and careful scaling strategies, which adds to the operational complexity for Hybris shops.

• Insights into search performance and user behavior are basic with Solr. Hybris teams may struggle to get actionable analytics that help optimize the search experience and improve conversions

Why Do We Need Coveo? 

Coveo comes in as a strong alternative. Coveo offers a cloud-hosted, AI-powered search platform that integrates smoothly with SAP Commerce Cloud (Hybris). It removes the heavy lifting around infrastructure management, providing automatic scaling and high availability. Coveo’s AI models learn from Hybris users’ interactions in real-time, delivering personalized and highly relevant search results without custom coding. Plus, its advanced analytics help businesses continuously optimize the search experience and drive more conversions.

For SAP Hybris users, Coveo reduces technical complexity, speeds up implementation, and enables smarter search experiences — making it a compelling choice for companies aiming to stand out with superior digital commerce.

Step-by-Step Guide: Integrate Coveo with SAP Hybris (SAP Commerce Cloud) 

Prerequisites

• SAP Commerce Cloud environment up and running (preferably version 2211+)

• Access to Coveo Cloud Platform account (you can create a free trial on https://www.coveo.com/)

• Administrator access to Hybris server and storefront codebase

• Basic knowledge of SAP Commerce (Hybris) architecture and extension development

• Basic knowledge of Maven, Git, and Hybris build processes

Step 1: Prepare the Coveo Cloud Environment 

1. Create a Coveo Organization

   • Sign up at Coveo Cloud 

   • Create a new organization for your project : https://platform.cloud.coveo.com. 

2. Create a Project 

3. Create Source

   • Navigate to Sources → New Source.

   • Choose Custom API Source for your SAP Commerce catalog.

   • Configure the source to receive data from your Hybris system.

4. Create a Search Token (optional)

   • This token will be used by the storefront to perform search queries securely.

Once your SAP Commerce (Hybris) catalog is successfully indexed into Coveo, you can integrate Coveo search results back into your Hybris frontend (e.g., storefront or custom APIs) using Coveo’s REST Search API. 

Test via Swagger 

Request 

curl -X 'POST' \

  'https://platform.cloud.coveo.com/rest/search/v2?organizationId=<your_organizationId>&viewAllContent=true' \

  -H 'accept: application/json' \

  -H 'Authorization: Bearer x0xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxd1b9' \

  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \

  -d '{

  "q": "AC Power Adapter ACK-E2"

}

Response 

{

  "totalCount": 1,

  "totalCountFiltered": 1,

  "duration": 67,

  "indexDuration": 17,

  "requestDuration": 65,

  "searchUid": "ae077f16-625e-45f9-8bxxxxxxxxx",

  "pipeline": "default",

  "apiVersion": 2,

  "queryCorrections": [],

  "index": "pqwrc7liq2vwuk2xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx,

  "indexRegion": "us-east-1",

  "indexToken": "cHF3cmM3bGlxMnZ3dWsyNHpuNGtjNWIyxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx==",

  "refinedKeywords": [],

  "triggers": [],

  "termsToHighlight": {

    "ac": [],

    "power": [],

    "adapter": []

  },

  "phrasesToHighlight": {

    "ack e2": {

      "ack": [],

      "e2": []

    }

  },

  "groupByResults": [],

  "facets": [],

  "suggestedFacets": [],

  "categoryFacets": [],

  "results": [

    {

      "title": "AC Power Adapter ACK-E2",

      "uri": "product://594471",

      "printableUri": "product://594471",

      "clickUri": "https://electronics.local:9002/expertshybrisstorefront/Open-Catalogue/Components/Power-Supplies/Power-Adapters-%26-Inverters/AC-Power-Adapter-ACK-E2/p/594471",

      "uniqueId": "42.46180$product://594471",

      "excerpt": "",

      "firstSentences": null,

      "summary": null,

      "flags": "SkipSentencesScoring;HasAllMetaDataStream",

      "hasHtmlVersion": false,

      "hasMobileHtmlVersion": false,

      "score": 5158,

      "percentScore": 81.66549,

      "rankingInfo": null,

      "rating": 0,

      "isTopResult": false,

      "isRecommendation": false,

      "isUserActionView": false,

      "titleHighlights": [

        {

          "length": 2,

          "offset": 0

        },

        {

          "length": 5,

          "offset": 3

        },

        {

          "length": 7,

          "offset": 9

        },

        {

          "length": 6,

          "offset": 17

        }

      ],

      "firstSentencesHighlights": [],

      "excerptHighlights": [],

      "printableUriHighlights": [],

      "summaryHighlights": [],

      "parentResult": null,

      "childResults": [],

      "totalNumberOfChildResults": 0,

      "absentTerms": [],

      "raw": {

        "systitle": "AC Power Adapter ACK-E2",

        "sysurihash": "bKMUBHppñcB1iLhq",

        "urihash": "bKMUBHppñcB1iLhq",

        "sysuri": "product://594471/",

        "systransactionid": 239,

        "sysindexeddate": 1748265469000,

        "permanentid": "af035fed88c1cb7eb91d46e16e41de17e9b2183688f6bb0fa9e54f6a4dbd",

        "transactionid": 239,

        "title": "AC Power Adapter ACK-E2",

        "date": 1748265469000,

        "objecttype": "product",

        "rowid": 1748265469612053500,

        "size": 2718,

        "clickableuri": "https://electronics.local:9002/expertshybrisstorefront/Open-Catalogue/Components/Power-Supplies/Power-Adapters-%26-Inverters/AC-Power-Adapter-ACK-E2/p/594471",

        "syssource": "electronics-en-USD-US-source",

        "orderingid": 1748265436691,

        "syssize": 2718,

        "sysdate": 1748265469000,

        "primaryid": "MJFU2VKCJBYHBQ5RMNBDC2KMNBYS4NBWGE4DALTEMVTGC5LMOQ",

        "wordcount": 0,

        "source": "electronics-en-USD-US-source",

        "collection": "default",

        "indexeddate": 1748265469000,

        "sysclickableuri": "https://electronics.local:9002/expertshybrisstorefront/Open-Catalogue/Components/Power-Supplies/Power-Adapters-%26-Inverters/AC-Power-Adapter-ACK-E2/p/594471",

        "sysrowid": 1748265469612053500,

        "uri": "product://594471/",

        "syscollection": "default"

      },

      "Title": "AC Power Adapter ACK-E2",

      "Uri": "product://594471",

      "PrintableUri": "product://594471",

      "ClickUri": "https://electronics.local:9002/expertshybrisstorefront/Open-Catalogue/Components/Power-Supplies/Power-Adapters-%26-Inverters/AC-Power-Adapter-ACK-E2/p/594471",

      "UniqueId": "42.46180$product://594471",

      "Excerpt": "",

      "FirstSentences": null

    }

  ],

  "extendedResults": {}

}

Use Coveo Search in Hybris via REST API 

Step 1: Configure the REST API Call in Hybris

You’ll need to implement a service (e.g., using a Spring service or controller) in SAP Commerce that calls the Coveo Search API.

Example REST Call (Java using RestTemplate):

String url = "https://platform.cloud.coveo.com/rest/search/v2";

HttpHeaders headers = new HttpHeaders();

headers.setBearerAuth("your-search-token");

headers.setContentType(MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON);

String payload = """

{

  "q": "laptop",

  "firstResult": 0,

  "numberOfResults": 10,

  "facets": [

    { "field": "brand", "type": "specific" }

  ]

}

""";

HttpEntity<String> request = new HttpEntity<>(payload, headers);

ResponseEntity<String> response = restTemplate.postForEntity(url, request, String.class);

Step 2: Create an Endpoint in Hybris

Expose a Hybris controller endpoint that wraps the call to the Coveo API and returns search results to your frontend:

@RequestMapping(value = "/search/coveo", method = RequestMethod.GET)

@ResponseBody

public String searchProducts(@RequestParam String query) {

    return coveoSearchService.search(query); // where coveoSearchService implements the logic above

}

 Create UI page and integrate this API response