Welcome back to getting to know Sitecore search. In this post we’ll take a tour of the Sitecore Search UI and cover some of the basic terminology used when talking about Sitecore Search. Let’s get started!
Sitecore Search UI
Across the top
- Site Switcher – Let’s you switch between multiple Search accounts
- Account – Manage your account
Down the left side
- Home (Site Performance) – View stats and metrics, filter by date and device, create and export reports
- Pages – Manage pages, variations, variation schedule, preview results
- Widgets – Manage widgets, variations, rules (boost, bury, blacklist, slots, visitor context)
- Analytics – Drill into analytics by widget, keywords, content
- Global Resources – Manage the global widget, keyword synonyms, notifications
- Catalog – View indexed content items, attributes, stats, visitor profile details
- Developer Resources – View api access details, use the api explorer, monitor events in real time
- Administration – Manage sources, crawler settings, document extractors, scan frequency, account users
Terminology
I read through the Sitecore search documentation and I found it to be a well-written guide. Also, I had to jump back and forth between the guide and the UI a few times as I was reading to fully understand the new terminology being presented and how the pieces are connected. Here is a list of helpful terminology related to Sitecore Search.
- Allowed Domains – A list of domains the crawler is allowed to crawl. A link to any other domain is excluded.
- Attribute – Metadata about an index document (ie content type, url, title, description)
- Authentication – Allows the crawler to access protected content
- CEC – Customer Engagement Console (search management portal)
- Content – An index document
- Document Extractor – Creates the index document for a url
- Document Extractor Type: XPath – Use xpath syntax to get attributes from the html
- Document Extractor Type: CSS – Use css selectors to get attributes from the html
- Document Extractor Type: JS – Use custom javascript to get attributes from the html
- Facet – Allow the user to narrow results
- Global Widget Settings – Settings and rules inherited by all other widgets
- Index Document – JSON object that represents a url on your site
- Locale – Region or language for a source
- Locale Extractor – Reads the locale from the url
- Locale Extractor Type: Url – Use a regular expression to read the locale from the url
- Locale Extractor Type: Header – Use an http header to read the locale from the url
- Locale Extractor Type: JS – Use custom javascript to read the locale from the url
- Page – A page on your site that contains a search widget
- Request Extractor – Generate requests to the crawler for urls that are not discoverable through links on the site
- Rule – Control how search results are returned (boost, bury, blacklist, pin)
- Source – The content you want search to access
- Tagger – Part of the document extractor that reads the url and gets the attributes
- Textual Relevance – Control the priority of each attribute in finding results
- Traffic – The percentage of visitors that will see a widget variation
- Trigger – Starting page for the web crawler
- Visitor Context – Metatdata about a visitor that helps show personalized results
- Web Crawler – Tool to scan a site for content
- Widget – A search component that can be placed on a page
- Widget Schedule – Schedule a widget to appear between specific dates
- Widget Split Testing – Allow multiple active widget variations to serve different amounts of traffic
- Widget Variation – Allows a widget to have different rules
Up Next
In the next post, we’ll look at the default setup with a fresh account, the default document extractor, the catalog of content items.
Follow me on linkedin to get notifications as new articles are posted.