Site search
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.