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On October 9, 2025, Adobe took Live Search's advanced capabilities to general availability. The specifics: the startsWith and contains search operators are now open to every merchant, with no custom development needed to use them.
What the operators do
Traditional search matches exactly or approximately. startsWith matches products whose names begin with the search term, which is what you want for brand searches and category browsing. contains does substring matching, so a term buried in a product description still counts. Together they give you more control over what search actually returns.
What that looks like on a storefront
A customer searching "Nike Air" with startsWith gets Nike shoes ahead of general athletic wear. A customer searching "waterproof" with contains gets products whose descriptions mention waterproof features, not only the ones tagged that way. Customers find the right product sooner, which is the whole point.
Combining them
Operators can be combined — products starting with a particular brand that also contain a particular feature. You build the rule; the customer just experiences a search that works. Live Search combines the operators with relevance ranking, and merchants can layer custom rules on top, such as prioritising particular brands or categories — all inside Adobe Commerce, with no separate search platform to run.
Performance
Live Search processes these operators in milliseconds even on large catalogues, and the optimisation happens at the infrastructure level. Thousands of products is not the number at which this starts to hurt.
What this means for you
The operators are live now, and picking them up is a search configuration change rather than a development project. If you are not on Live Search yet, this is a reasonable moment to look at it — search quality is one of the shorter routes between a change and a conversion rate you can measure.