Showing posts with label search. Show all posts
Showing posts with label search. Show all posts

Friday 1 September 2023

What's New with Sitecore Search ?

Like others, I was also attendee and part of Sitecore community at SUGCON India 2023. It was great pleasure and tons of chat with everyone.

After the 2 days events, I tried to consolidate my notes and thought to share Best first with community. And Product name is Sitecore Search.


Before deep dive into Sitecore Search, I would like to point out few statements from tech communities.

Forrester, "43% of user directly go to Search box, and leads generated 2-3 times more as compare to normal journey".

Sitecore, "Today Search is about more than just entering words into a box and hoping for the right results".

Previously with Sitecore, for search we were using solr/azure/lucene search providers. and with that

Challenge for Content & Marketer, There is lack of tooling for search experience.

Challenge for Developer & IT

  • long time to implement
  • complex scenario for development
  • if any change request, then back to Team again
  • Search Expertise required

And on that Sitecore came with SaaS products to resolve above challenges and introduced 2 composable search new products.

  • For e-commerce search experience
    • Sitecore Discover 
  • Content Search experience
    • Sitecore Search


In this article, I will share detailed key features and benefits of using Sitecore Search.

Benefits of using Sitecore search
  • Great customer experience
  • Personalization - 100% automation [easy to configure by marketers]
  • Multiple Index sources, no need to changes existing external search indexing systems
  • Marketer Friendly, mean marketer can easily manage search experience without any technical knowledge
  • Trunkey setup building fast with simple implementation
A separate Sitecore search platform to manage, configuration on Search result items. Below are the major key points that can be used:
  • Track Site search performance
    • Overall engagement
    • Preview Search engagement
    • Search Page engagement
    • Recommendation engagement
  • All tracking data easily to download, sharing, exporting functionality with Marketers
  • Pages
    • Can have different result pages variants[A/B testing]
      • Can play with common widgets across pages
      • Can PIN results on particular searched key to show particular item on top
      • Can boost items on particular searched key
      • Can Personalized as well on particular searched key
      • Can burry Current or Blacklist current particular item based on usages
    • On Variations, we will be having section to get and modify items under Boost Rules, Burry Rules and Blacklist Rules
  • Analytics - to view analytics
    • Widget view
      • Content by views
      • Content by clicks
      • Content report by Date Range, devices, Region
    • Keyword view
      • On searched key, Content report by Date Range, devices, Region
      • Clicks, views, unique searches
      • How many search results based on searched key
      • Null searches
      • Biggest gainer and decliners
  • Catalog - to add different website as well, to get the results from different sources.
  • Administrator tools
With Sitecore Search, we will be having a feature to get other sites search results to manage. Mean that we can interact with Indexes resources (WEB and API Crawlers) using endpoints and can manage using available tooling.


Hope this will help to understand better about Sitecore Search.

Sunday 14 November 2021

Introduction to SearchStax - Search with Sitecore

There are various providers to implement Search with Sitecore Instance. Today's article will help to understand about Searchstax with Sitecore.

Currently we have options as provider to implement search like - Lucene, solr, azure. Also tools that makes search Implementation easy, fast and with analytics features - Coveo & Searchstax.

But with my experience on Searchstax there are below points as feature which makes it unique and reason to use Searchstax.

1. Readymade Search (ready to use with any Sitecore project in next 10 mins) with Multi-site options - with no code change required.

2. Easy interface to manage analytics and only Integration activity from Sitecore CMS.

3. Custom Search Page Implementation (Can change any existing Custom search page provider connection from existing to SearchStax search API)

searchstax-sitecore


There are also list of features with SearchStax to use for Search analytics

facet, sort, hit highlighting

Stop words, synonyms, spell check and auto-suggest

Field boosting, rules and Promotions

Reporting options on Search analytics

Readymade search page theming, Preview feature on Search page.


Benefits to use Searchstax for search

High availability, no field limits

Search item's click or searched key level tracking

No-additional pre-requisites skill required for developers

 

There is no change for below points

for computed index, there is no change in code/configuration to implement.

Field/Template include/exclude configurations are same as with other providers.

Connect to any environment search index from developer's machine.

From developer's machine - index setup and code debugging as very easy [bcz of search endpoint API].


Wednesday 12 May 2021

How to remove all data from Sitecore Solr index ?

Challenge:

Few days back, was working on sitecore solr search related issue that 


From solr portal, was able to retrieve data from index even deleted items (solr index caching issue).

But in the code getting null value for item's properties.


Tried many alternatives to resolve issue (IISRESET, config review, code debug, index rebuild), but no luck.


Approach to fix above issue:

After removing all data from solr index, and then index rebuild issue was resolved.




Steps:

1. From browser open hosted solr portal

2. choose index

3. go to document tab


or copy below URL and hit

1. https://localhost:8987/solr/your_index_name/documents


after this


choose Document Type as Solr command (raw xml or JSON)

then paste query

<delete><query>*:*</query></delete>

and Submit document.

Wednesday 17 February 2021

How to create sitecore custom index ?

With Sitecore, If there are lots of data on the instance where search needed, then Sitecore default index will not be good because it will be time and memory consuming.

In that case - creating custom index will be better approach which contains only searched items.


Let's start with creating solr custom index


Go to your solr installed location by copying sitecore_web_index and rename with sitecore_custom_index [<instancename>_web_index - so don't confused with sitecore]



once copied, then open core.properties and update name property under this directory as below screenshot



after above changes, restart solr service.

Now go to path \App_Config\Sitecore\ContentSearch and copy Sitecore.ContentSearch.Solr.Index.Web.config and rename with Sitecore.ContentSearch.Solr.Index.Custom.onfig as below


once file created open update settings for 
indexname, rootpath, which items wanted to include and exclude in index. as below



Let me know if feel any issue or feedback.