Sitecore Search is a search engine provided by Sitecore and is a SaaS service that allows you to implement site search on your website. This article confirm how this service works by referring to the developer site of Sitecore, which has been implemented.
What is Sitecore Search?
This product is a spin-out from a service provided by Reflektion, a company Sitecore acquired in September 2021. The original product, Sitecore Discover, was a search engine for e-commerce sites.
on Sitecore.com
Since we have already implemented the system in-house, we will first look at how it works on the site. First, here is the current search page.
The elements on this page are a search box, a facet on the left to narrow down the search results, and an area to display the search results. The display of this area is handled entirely by Sitecore Search.
This is the page, but once you do a search using the Reflektion keyword and return to the search page again, the content displayed has changed.
Thus, you can see how the built-in mechanism of displaying recommendations based on past search terms can be used in the form of an easy-to-use search engine.
For Sitecore Developer sites
We have set up a website for developers called https://developers.sitecore.com/. When you access the site, you will see the above screen.
If you try to enter text in the search box on this page, you will be replaced by the following screen
If you enter the keyword GraphQL here, the items displayed have changed.
You can see a list of keywords related to GraphQL displayed on the left side of the screen, and on the right side you can see the potential content of the site. In this case, ARTICLE - Sitecore Documentation is shown, which indicates that you can search for Sitecore's online manual.
Of the items displayed on the left side, move the mouse cursor over graphql search query invalidoperation to change the item.
The search results are listed as FORUM - Sitecore Stack Exchange. In fact, this search for developers is not only for the site, but also for content that is targeted to developers.
Sitecore Search can run a crawler with a bot to retrieve site data and display it in search results, so it can also retrieve data and produce search results no matter what the website is built on.
We also confirmed that, unlike the first search screen we introduced, you can use a search format in which candidates are displayed around a search box and the resulting recommendations appear.
Summary
In this issue of Sitecore Search, we have introduced the two patterns used by Sitecore.com. In the next article, we will introduce more about Sitecore Search, including its management screen. The official Sitecore Search documentation is available on the Sitecore.com website as follows