Search

Introduction

This document provides an introduction to the search functionality of the EPiServer platform. The EPiServer search is used by the global search available to users in OnlineCenter, as well as the templates available for both EPiServer CMS and EPiServer Relate. The underlying functionality is based on the Lucene search engine which is part of the EPiServer Framework.

About EPiServer Search

Search in EPiServer features the following:

• Global search across all types of content.
• Static facets - categories and types, possibility to define which facets you want to filetr on.
• Event driven indexing - iInstead of crawling the entire HTML content of the site, you push the content you�d like to index to the search service, which supports good performance.
• Index any type of content - web pages, document files, or community content.
• External content - The search index can be extended to include results from external systems using the search web service and an open protocol based on Atom.
• Access based search result filtering - ensuring that users will only see content they have access to.
• Search API similar to the Lucene API which is used by the search service. The search service is pluggable, meaning that you can replace Lucene with another index and still use the same API for searching on the client.
• Stemming on English, provides the same support as Lucene.
• Instant search - the most important information is shown as you type, for example a phone number if you are searching for a colleague on an intranet.

You can create and customize search functionality quickly and easily for EPiServer products. A search solution to help website visitors find what they want can be created by combining EPiServer Data Source Controls, listing controls and even third party controls (.NET etc).

SearchDataSource is one of the data source controls shipped with EPiServer. Example search functionality using the EPiServer SearchDataSource control is used in the public templates package. To take a closer look at the example search functionality install an example site and open the project in Visual Studio, see the EPiServer CMS installation instructions for further information.

See Also

• Introduction to search in EPiServer
• EPiServer Full-Text Search Service
• EPiServer Full-Text Search Service Configuration
• EPiServer Full-Text Search Client
• EPiServer Full-Text Search Client Configuration

The search integration for EPiServer CMS, Relate (Community) and Commerce are described in more detail in their respective SDK under the Developer Guide "Search" section.