Data Points
Data points are recurring pieces of structured information extracted from your website's content during indexing. Once defined, the SS360 crawler picks them up and transforms them into structured data you can use to:
- enrich search result snippets
- power filters
- add sorting options
For example, on a blog you might extract an author name and a publishing date. On an ecommerce site, you might extract price, brand, SKU, or stock quantity.
When looking at today.com, for example, Health & Wellness posts always show the author and publishing date below the headline. With data points, you can extract this information from each article to generate richer result snippets — making it easy for users to see who wrote an article or to sort results by date.
Set up a data point
Go to Data Structuring → Data Points in the SS360 control panel and click Add New Data Point.
Fill out the template to configure your first data point. Your settings may look something like this:
Data point types
You can define data points as one of four types:
- Text — displays information within each search result
- Numeric — displays information and can also be used as a sorting option (e.g. price, weight, quantity)
- Date — displays dates and can be used as a sorting option
- Boolean — represents true/false values
Data point settings
| Setting | Description |
|---|---|
| Name | The label shown next to the data point in search results. |
| Partial matching | Makes the data point substring-searchable. When enabled, a query for 12345678 will match a product with SKU EU12345678. Useful for SKUs, article numbers, and frequently searched identifiers. |
| XPath | A valid XPath expression pointing the crawler to the DOM element that contains the data point. Every matching element on your site will be extracted. |
| Unique | Limits extraction to the first node matched by the XPath. Enable this when a page contains multiple matching nodes but you only need the first value. |
Click Save after configuring each data point.
Re-index your entire site after adding or changing data points for the changes to take effect.
Define a data point source
You can point the crawler to data using any of the following source types.
XPath
If the data point exists in your page's HTML (visible or hidden), enter a valid XPath expression. Every DOM element matching the expression will be extracted.
The easiest way to find the right XPath is with the Chrome extension XPath Helper. For a deeper introduction, see Working with XPaths.
URL pattern
To extract a segment of a page's URL as a data point, use a regular expression. For example:
https://mysite.com/([^/]+)/
This extracts the first matching group from the URL path.
Linked data (JSON-LD)
If your site uses JSON-LD structured data, you can extract data points directly from it.
Select the condition type from the dropdown, or type your own if none of the options match your schema. To extract a top-level property such as SKU from a Product type:
To extract a nested property — for example, the brand name Canyon from a brand/name path — use a slash-separated notation:
brand/name
PDF metadata
You can extract PDF metadata properties as data points with a single click. The following properties are supported:
- Author
- CreationDate
- Creator
- ModDate
- Producer
- Title
Extraction Preview is not available for PDF metadata. To test your configuration, manually index a single PDF file in the Index section.
Date data points
Date data points can be used for sorting. To extend the today.com example: to display the publishing date in search results and offer it as a sorting option, define two separate data points that both point to the same XPath.
The XPath points to the publishing date found in the top-right corner of each article, extracted from a schema.org meta attribute:
SS360 extracts this date twice and uses it in two ways:
- Sorting option — configured as a numeric "Publishing date" data point with Unique selected, so only the first matching node is used.
- Snippet display — configured to show the date below the Author data point in search results, also with Unique selected.
By defining two data points from the same XPath, you can simultaneously create a sorting option and enrich the search snippet.
Below the data points, the Default Sorting option lets you select "Publishing date" as the default sort order so the newest articles appear first.
Numeric data points
Numeric data points work similarly to date data points and can be used for sorting. You can extract price, rating, dimensions, coordinates, or any other numeric value.
Numeric data points can also extract dates, but a dedicated Date type is available and preferred for that use case.
To define a data point for product price, point the XPath to the price element on a product page:
Because the data point type is numeric, non-numeric characters such as $ are automatically stripped during extraction.
The result: a single data point used in the search snippet, as the basis for a Price filter, and as a sorting option — all at once:
When to deselect "Unique"
By default, Unique limits extraction to the first matching node. Deselect it when you want to extract multiple values from a single page — for example, an ingredient list where each ingredient is a separate node.
On today.com's Food category, each recipe page contains a full ingredient list:
Each data point consists of a name — "Ingredients" in this case — and an XPath pointing to the ingredient list. With Unique deselected, every ingredient node is captured.
When a user searches for a recipe like "Z'paghetti Bolognese", the ingredients appear directly in the search result:
You can also place hidden elements on your pages — tables or other markup not visible to users — to hold structured data that the crawler can extract and include in search results.
Re-index your entire site after making changes to let them take effect.
Result group data points
Data points can be used for result grouping. Previously created data points are available when configuring a result group, or you can enter an XPath or URL pattern while creating a new group.
For a full walkthrough, see the result group tutorial.
Show data points in search suggestions
To display data points inside search suggestions, add a dataPoints array to the relevant content block in ss360Config:
var ss360Config = {
/*...*/
suggestions: {
source: {
queryBased: {
content: [{
type: 'resultGroup',
dataPoints: [
{ key: 'Cost', type: 'value' },
{ key: 'Calories', type: 'chip' },
{ key: 'Protein', type: 'kv' },
]
}]
}
}
}
}
The key value must exactly match the data point name as defined in the control panel. Data points are displayed in the order they appear in the dataPoints array.
To see this in action, try searching for granola on the search example page — the "Calories" and "Cost" data points are displayed in the suggestions.
Display types
| Type | Behaviour |
|---|---|
value | Displays the data point value as plain text |
chip | Displays the data point value as a chip |
kv | Displays both key and value, e.g. Protein: 3g |
Using an older version of Site Search 360 (v13 and earlier)?
The dataPoints parameter is not available in v13 and earlier. Use the deprecated extraHtml parameter instead:
suggestions: {
extraHtml: '<b>Price</b>: #Price#'
}
Upgrade to a current version to use dataPoints.
Send data points via the API
When using the SS360 HTTP REST API to upload pages, include data points in the structuredData array. Each entry must define a name and a value for that page:
For example, a page with an Author and a Publishing Date would include two objects in structuredData — one for each data point.