Searching

Episerver Find excels in traditional, free-text search scenarios and data-centric queries involving exact matching using filters. Find also supports data aggregation using facets. This topic introduces search and filtering in Find.

Note: When querying for objects inheriting IContent, the GetContentResultextensions should be used. For information, see GetContentResult.

How it works

You search and query using an instance of the IClient interface. This, along with extension methods, offers a traditional, object-oriented API and convenient fluent API. Most documentation found here covers the fluent API.

Searches

You can execute a free-text search for objects of a specific type via the GetResult method, which returns:

An object with result items
The number of documents that match the search query
Facets
Information about execution time

var searchResult = client.Search<BlogPost>()
                        .For("Beethoven")
                        .GetResult();

int numberOfDocsMatchingTheSearch = searchResult.TotalMatching;
int executionTime = searchResult.ServerDuration;
FacetResults facets = searchResult.Facets;
IEnumerable<SearchResultItem<BlogPost>> hits = searchResult.Hits;

Each hit object contains the indexed object, its ID, highlights (if requested), and its score.

var searchResult = client.Search<BlogPost>()
                        .For("Beethoven")
                        .GetResult();

foreach (var hit in searchResult.Hits)
{
    string id = hit.Id;
    BlogPost item = hit.Item;
    Highlights highlights = hit.Highlights;
    double? score = hit.Score;
}

Unless specified, searches are performed over all indexed properties, including nested properties. You can specify which properties to search.

client.Search<BlogPost>()
    .For("Beethoven")
    .InFields(
        x => x.Title, 
        x => x.Tags,
        x => x.Author.Name);

Wildcard searches

A wildcard is a search technique where you include for example an asterisk (*) to specify any number of characters in a search query. Wildcards should be used with restriction, as this may affect performance of your Episerver Find solution.

Example: *work or *work*
Not only would these be performance heavy, they may also give irrelevant results and bad relevance.

Recommendations:

Never use prefix or prefix/suffix wildcards
Use at least 3 characters when applying wildcards.
Avoid wildcards on many or all fields.
Avoid using wildcards on lengthy fields.

Note: Excessive use of wildcard searches may seriously impact the performance of your Find solution, and may result in service unavailability.

Filtering

The service and client API also supports filtering. If applied to a free text query, filtering restricts search results to those matching the filters.

client.Search<BlogPost>()
    .For("Beethoven")
    .Filter(x => x.Tags.Match("Music"));

If applied without a free text query, filters let you query for objects in an exact manner, similar to traditional database queries.

client.Search<BlogPost>()
    .Filter(x => x.Tags.Match("Music"));

Stop words

A “stop word” is a commonly used word that a search engine has been programmed to ignore when indexing entries, and when retrieving search results. The list of words to exclude is called a “stop word list”.

By default, Episerver Find indexes everything and does not apply stop words at the index level. The reason for this is that the use of stop words has a bad impact och precision. For example, when having a stop word in the query, it will simply match any document, and make phrases match even in cases when they should not. Indexing everything allows for having exact phrase matches, even if the phrase contains any word that one might consider a stop word.

MoreLikeThis is a special case. Here the stop words are used when selecting terms from the source document, and the stop word is simply a part of that specific query.

If you still want to use stop words in queries, simply remove the words from the query string before passing it to Episerver Find.

Last updated: Mar 27, 2019

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