Looking over the English dictionary for the word ‘facet’, I came to realize that facet means way more things that I originally knew: (according to http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/facet)
- one of the small, polished plane surfaces of a cut gem
- a similar surface cut on a fragment of rock by the action of water, windblown sand etc.
- aspect, phase, as in: ‘They carefully examined every facet of the argument’
- in Architecture, any of the faces of a column cut in a polygonal form
- in Zoology, one of the corneal lenses of a compound arthropod eye
- in Dentistry, a small highly burnished area, usually on the enamel surface of a tooth, produced by abrasion between opposing teeth in chewing
However, during this post I’m not going to discuss the origin of the word, but rather what a ‘facet’ means in terms of Azure Search.
Have you ever wondered how popular on-line shopping stored are able to create those complex filtering scenarios, different for every category of products and different in functionality as well? More specifically, how come high-end products show pricing categories based on a quite a few high price ranges while the accessories category comes with less, lower price ranges? Here’s an example on Amazon.co.uk:
