Case Study: Powell's City of Books achieves 88% faster re-indexing and more relevant on-site search with HawkSearch

Providing Book Lovers A Cohesive, Relevant and Meaningful Search Experience

Powell’s Books, a Portland-based bookseller with five locations and over 500 employees, operates a global ecommerce site carrying more than 8 million SKUs. Their legacy search was struggling to keep pace—full re-indexes took over 24 hours, search results were often too broad or irrelevant, and the team lacked tools to influence results or drive suggestive selling.

Powell’s implemented Hawksearch, whose fast auto-indexing reduced full re-index time by 88% and delivers more personalized, relevant results through Smart Autocomplete, faceted navigation and Visitor Targeting. The Hawksearch marketing workbench (Boost & Bury, Pinning, Banners, SEO Influencer) plus machine‑learning Relevant Recommendations led to a 28% decrease in search exits, a 44% increase in time after search, and measurable uplifts in conversion and add-on revenue.

Powell's City of Books