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Questions about Search & Navigation demo developer Index

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Hi guys. I’m studying search in Optimizely. In the process, a couple of questions arose, I will be glad if you answer so that I can get a complete picture:

1) I've created an account to manage my index. Write some code and it works well. But does Optimizely allow me to store the index somehow locally/separately on my server? Sometimes the client wants everything to be on his server for better sequrity. Is that possible?

2) Does Optimizely Find allow me to create multiple indexes? for example, I have a lot of content and would like to create 3-4 indexes, each of which will contain its own data area. If yes, how will these settings look in the appsettings.json file ?

3) Based on what does the standard tree search in the navigation panel work? It works before I connected the index, I assume it accesses the sql server?

thank you all!

#321035
Apr 25, 2024 14:54
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  1. The index is stored in their cloud environment. You cannot have it locally.
  2. No
  3. To my knowledge the search panels in the CMS (pages, blocks and media) can use either Search & Navigation, the content API as you mention or the good old lucene based Episerver Search.
    • AFAIK Search & Navigation will only search in content that you have indexed, if you make customizations to the S&N index they will be reflected in the internal search boxes
    • The content API implementation is very basic, it will only search on items that BEGINSWITH the same thing you type.
    • The Episerver Search option is usually used for OnPremise installations without S&N or where S&N is heavily customized. Read more about it here GitHub - episerver/content-search-lucene

When building websites that require complex search implementations some of us rely on third party solutions, like Elastic or Hawksearch. Not saying you should, S&N is great, and while you are at it have a good look at Optimizely Graph which in my opinion is a quite nice replacement for S&N Get started with Optimizely Graph.

#321168
Apr 28, 2024 19:26
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Thank you for such a detailed explanation!

#321331
May 01, 2024 13:34
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To expand Eric's great answer, for 3. - you can create your own implementation of ContentSearchProviderBase and use it for the search box, for example Foundation/src/Foundation/Infrastructure/Cms/Settings/GlobalSettingsSearchProvider.cs at 63970d5a1b65a666803e8552226afbcc03c0641d · episerver/Foundation (github.com).

By default no it does not hit db, I believe there is no default search provider configured for your "empty" CMS site. it used to be Episerver.Search if I recall correctly but that was no longer maintained and was removed with CMS 12 

#321336
May 01, 2024 21:18
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