Site search
Search indexes To configure your website’s internal search, you must first define a search index and then drop the Search box 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 option to filter search queries by permissions. You can create a search index that only applies to a selection of pages under a group page. You can also create a search index applied to selected sites in a multisite environment. 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 supports three search services out of the box: Lucene, Azure AI Search service, and Elasticsearch service. By default, Sitefinity CMS uses Lucene, but you can switch between search services. The last 2 decouple the search index data from the local storage and can provide full search capabilities when the site is deployed in the cloud. For information about generating and storing search indexes in the cloud, see Azure search services.
To help you choose which search service suits your needs best, see Compare search services.
Search suggestions
The Search widget supports search suggestions that you can configure by additional properties. The option to filter the suggestions by date/time, integer, categories, and tags is supported by the search API and can be applied by overriding the Search results widget.
Search while reindexing
When you reindex your search indexes a temporary index is created to allow users to use the search functuionality at the same time.
The temporary index counts toward your service's index quota and is removed once reindexing completes. If disabled or if the quota is exceeded, search may not work properly during the reindexing process.
To disable the creation of a temporary index:
- In Sitefinity CMS backend, navigate to Settings » Advanced » Search.
- Click the box under Enable search while reindexing.
- Click Save changes.
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