The July 2026 release focuses on improving search performance, indexing reliability, merchandising behavior, Recommendations, and Dashboard usability. Key areas include OpenSearch performance improvements, expanded PDF search and indexing capabilities, more reliable Autocomplete and Visitor Targeting behavior, and continued improvements across Recommendations and search configuration.

Release Highlights

• PDF search and indexing capabilities have been added to support extracting searchable content from PDF files and configuring PDF indexing within HawkSearch. This capability must be enabled and configured by the HawkSearch team. Customers interested in PDF search should contact their HawkSearch representative.
• Landing Page headings now support HTML markup, providing additional flexibility for content displayed at the top of a Landing Page.
• Search handling has been improved for requests containing large lists of product IDs, reducing the risk of failures caused by request length limitations.
• Autocomplete Top Facet configuration has been improved so supported values above the previous default limit are retained and displayed correctly.
• City-level geographic Visitor Targets now activate more reliably when a visitor matches the configured location.
• Facets configured for alphabetical sorting now sort using the user-facing display labels rather than the underlying stored values.
• Products affected by Boost and Bury merchandising rules are now handled more consistently in Image Search.
• French Measurement Conversion behavior has been improved for supported units and French-language configurations.
• Applicable Workbench dropdowns are now searchable, making it easier to locate fields and other options within long selection lists.

Stability & Performance Updates

• OpenSearch performance has been improved for implementations using large hierarchical facets, reducing unnecessary processing overhead during Search API requests.
• Indexing hierarchy processing has been improved to reduce cases where indexing could become stuck or fail to complete.
• Additional timeout handling has been added to prevent Search requests from remaining active indefinitely when processing becomes unresponsive.
• Recommendations behavior has been improved across strategy previews, trending results, and tracking configuration.
• Landing Page canonical URLs now preserve configured trailing slashes instead of removing them automatically.
• Advanced Preview now maintains the selected search request type when Visitor Target settings are changed.
• Field validation has been improved so supported text field configurations can use Strip HTML without triggering an incorrect validation error.
• The automated Facet Ordering process has been updated to resolve errors that could prevent configured facets from being reordered successfully.

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If you have any questions or feedback about this release, please contact us at

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Until next time,

The HawkSearch Team