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Search and search indexes

You use search indexes to define different sets of content to be searched by the visitors on your website by using the internal search of the website. For example, you can create a search index that contains all news and when a user enters a search word, it will be applied to all news items on your website.

To configure your website’s internal search, you must first define a search index and then drop the Search and Search results widgets somewhere on your website page.

You can customize the search index settings to perform search based on a specific field of any content item Thus, you can narrow down search results generated for large content items. You also have the ability to filter search queries by permissions.

You can create a search index that applies only to a selection of pages under a group page.

If you have a media file in more than one language version, you can enable the option to get search results that include other language versions of media files, independently of the currently selected language.

Search services

Sitefinity CMS has three built-in search services: Lucene, AzureSearchService and ElasticsearchService. The last 2 decouple the search index from the machine storage and can provide full search capabilities including update or reindex when the site is deployed in the cloud. To learn about using the external search indexes, see Generate and store search indexes in the cloud. Once applied, you must rebuild all your indexes in order for them to be available on the new search service.

Search suggestions

The search widget supports search suggestions as of Sitefinity CMS 7.3. The option to filter the suggestions by date/time, integer, categories and tags is now supported by the search API and could be applied by overriding the SearchResults widget. To learn more about customizing the search results see For Developers: Customize search results by overriding the SearchResults class.

This section contains

Create search indexes
Configure website’s internal search. Define search index for single or multisite environment. Drop the Search and Search results widgets on the website.
Include content age in Lucene search score
Change the location of the Lucene search index files
NLB: Synchronize search indexes
Synchronize search indexes in a load-balanced environment.
Administration: Enable multilingual search results in media libraries
Create a search index that applies to group of pages
You can create a search index that applies only to a selection of pages under a group page by replacing the default PageInboundPipe with a custom one.
Index the contents of Excel files
Index the contents of Excel files by creating a text extractor that gets the data from published .xlsx files and adds it to a search index.
Sitefinity CMS search - under the hood
A detailed view of how Sitefinity CMS generates search indexes for its content items.
CRUD operations for a search index
The sample in this article demonstrates how you can use the API to create, update, and delete a search index and how you can perform a search operation.
Search with accented characters
Replace the default analyzer used by Lucene search with one that replaces accented characters with the corresponding unaccented ones.
Customize the Lucene search scoring
Sitefinity CMS versions 11.1 and above exposes a mechanism for influencing the Lucene search results via customizing the Lucene search scoring.
Compare search services
Compare the pros and cons of Lucene, Azure search, and Elasticsearch search services. Look at performance test results of the services.
Connect to search service
Connect to third party search service by implementing the ISearchService interface and replacing the registration using ServiceBus.RegisterService(service).
Generate and store search indexes in the cloud
If your project resides on a cloud storage, you can use search index generation and storage on external services as Azure Search or an external Elasticsearch server.
Index external content
Index data items that are managed on external systems.
Tutorial: Customize the label of the search button in a multiple site project
Add a document to a search index
The sample in this article demonstrates how you can use the API to create and add a new document to an existing search index.
Add a custom page taxonomy to a search index
Add a custom taxonomy for pages to a search index to filter search results, for example, by a tag.
Search in Advanced settings

Additional resources

Increase your Sitefinity skills by signing up for our free trainings. Get Sitefinity-certified at Progress Education Community to boost your credentials.

Get started with Integration Hub | Sitefinity Cloud | Sitefinity SaaS

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Web Security for Sitefinity Administrators

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Foundations of Sitefinity ASP.NET Core Development

The free on-demand video course teaches developers how to use Sitefinity .NET Core and leverage its decoupled architecture and new way of coding against the platform.

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