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 uses three built-in search services: Lucene, Azure Search service, and Elasticsearch service. The last 2 decouple the search index from the machine storage and can provide full search capabilities including update or reindex when the site is deployed in the cloud. To learn about using the external search indexes, see Generate and store search indexes in the cloud. Once applied, you must rebuild all your indexes in order for them to be available on the new search service.

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.

Additional resources

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