Sitecore Search is a platform for discovering content that operates independently from the front-end system. It provides connectors that can extract and index content from various sources, along with tools for managing search, conducting A/B testing, analyzing data, and configuring settings. By using Sitecore Search, you can develop exceptional, and predictive search experiences for your content, regardless of its origin.

The primary goal of Sitecore Search is to provide targeted and customized content to users when they need it. It is a fully SaaS-based solution that includes the following components:

Customer Engagement Console (CEC): Get search analytics, tests, configuration, all in one place.

Search & recommendations service: AI-based REST API for search queries and results.

Event service: A REST API to gather visitor interactions for optimizing the search experience.

What to expect during onboarding?

When you decide to onboard Sitecore Search into your organization’s tech stack, a Sitecore Search integration specialist will create your domain based on your subscription agreement. The integration specialist will also customize Sitecore Search according to your specific requirements. Throughout this process, there are certain tasks that the integration specialists handle, while the rest would need your attention.

 

Setting up your Search account

For setting up your Search Account, Sitecore personnel will usually begin by establishing your access to the Search Customer Engagement Console (CEC). You will need to provide Sitecore with a list of your Search users, create Sitecore user accounts, and send invitations to log in to the CEC.

After accepting this invitation, complete your user profile, and log in to CEC.

Configuring sources

Sitecore Search integration specialist will get your content crawled and indexed by Sitecore Search.

Sources:

A source defines the content you want Sitecore Search to access. Define a starting point while creating a source and establish the rules that define which content to crawl and index. When your visitors search for content, ‘Sitecore Search’ looks through the indexed documents, applies the Search algorithm, and displays relevant and personalized content. Without a source, Search can’t display content.

Create a Search advanced web crawler, a program that searches content and creates index documents. When you configure an advanced web crawler, you give Sitecore a starting point, also known as a trigger, like a sitemap or a link to an RSS feed, and then define rules. This includes the number of levels of the URL directory structure you want the search to include.

You do not upload any content into Search. Instead, it creates index documents from the content it searches and uses it to show relevant, personalized content to your visitors.

You can create more than one source and combine documents from multiple sources into one search experience. You can also archive a source and restore it later.

Content types:

The advanced web crawler source can crawl and index HTML pages, PDFs, and all Microsoft Office formats.

 

Index documents and attributes:

Sitecore Search uses Elasticsearch to handle indexing. When Search indexes content, it does the following:

Initially, it generates an index document and incorporates it into an internal Elasticsearch index. An index document, which serves as the fundamental storage unit, is a JSON object. For each URL or document, the search function generates a single index document.

For example, a 1000-word HTML page and a 10-page PDF become one single document.

It extracts attributes like the title, description, and image URL, for each indexed document and stores them as metadata. Later, when using the Search and Recommendation API to develop search experiences, you can utilize these characteristics. The Catalog page within the Customer Engagement Console (CEC) provides a platform where you can access documents and their corresponding attributes.

 

How to Set Up Sitecore Search for Your Project?

Setting up Sitecore Search for your project is a key step to ensure that your content management system is optimized for search functionality. Sitecore Search is a powerful feature that enables users to quickly find relevant content within your website or application. Let us look at the steps involved in setting up Sitecore Search:

• Determine your search requirements: The first step in setting up Sitecore Search for your project is to determine your search requirements. Consider what content you want to search, what fields you want to include in your search results, and what filters you want to use. This will help you to configure Sitecore Search to meet your specific needs.
  
  
• Create a search index: Once you have determined your search requirements, you can create a search index in Sitecore. A search index is a data structure that contains information about your content, including the fields that you want to search. Sitecore uses the Lucene or Solr search engine to power its search functionality. To create a search index in Sitecore, navigate to the Control Panel and select "Indexing Manager". Click the "New" button to create a new index, and then select the content items that you want to include in your index. You can also configure the fields that you want to include in your search results, as well as any filters that you want to use.
  
  
• Configure your search functionality: Once you have created your search index, you can configure your search functionality in Sitecore. Navigate to the "Content Editor" and select the content item that you want to search. In the "Search" tab, you can configure the search functionality for that item, including the search scope, filters, and sorting.
  
  
• Test your search functionality: It is important to test your search functionality to ensure that it is working as expected. You can test your search functionality by entering search queries in the search box and checking the results. You can also use the Sitecore Search API to perform more advanced searches and retrieve specific data from your search index.
  
  
• Customize your search results: Sitecore search also allows you to customize your search results to provide a superior user experience. You can customize your search results by adding fields, grouping results, and displaying images and other media. This will help you provide a more engaging and useful search experience for your users.
  
  

Conclusion

Setting up Sitecore Search for your overall project is a crucial step in ensuring that your content management system is well-optimized for enhanced search functionalities. By following the steps and planning your search requirements carefully, you can configure Sitecore Search to meet your specific needs and provide your users with fast and accurate search results.

 

Developer Resources in the CEC:

Sitecore Search provides developer tools in the Customer Engagement Console (CEC) that can be used to learn and test our services. The following developer resources are available through the CEC:

API Access - Provides essential information about accessing the APIs, including API keys and endpoints.

API Explorer - A tool to learn how to interact with the Search and Recommendation API, how to make runtime experience requests, and how the responses to those requests can be formatted.

Event Monitor - A tool to verify that you have implemented an experience correctly and that it is publishing events to Search from visitor interactions on your live website.

 

Tracking events:

As visitors interact with your page by clicking on widgets, logging in, upvoting articles, and so on, you must track those interactions and send them to Sitecore Search using the Events API. Sitecore Search uses events for generating analytic dashboards and driving personalization. If you track events thoroughly and accurately, the quality of insights generated through site analytics improves significantly enabling you to provide your site visitors with more personalized content.

 

What sets Sitecore Search apart?

The engineering team behind Sitecore Discover was given the opportunity to build something completely new using the latest technology and harnessing decades worth of experience with Commerce search, merchandising, and recommendations. The result was Sitecore Search, an incredible merger between a powerful content search engine and commerce-based concepts to produce a solution that is unique in the industry. You can think of Sitecore Search as "Discover 2.0" for content.