Getting started with Sitecore Search

Sitecore Search is a powerful search engine that delivers fast, relevant, and personalized search results, recommendations, and more for your website, across content and products. This topic covers what a developer needs to know before integrating Search into their organization’s website or application.

Before you integrate, it is important to understand how content becomes available for querying. While most of this setup is done by administrators, knowing the different personas and high-level structure helps developers build effective integrations.

Search users

There are three main types of users that interact with Sitecore Search during different times of the implementation.

  • Search Administrator or Search Engineer – interacts with the Sitecore Search user interface and is responsible for defining and configuring the entities, attributes, widgets, pages, and features that make up the end user’s search experience.

  • Search Developer – is responsible for integrating Sitecore Search with their organization’s website or application. They use the Sitecore Search interface for retrieving important technical information that’s used within the SDK or APIs during integration, like API keys, widget IDs, and so on.

  • Search User – is a business user or analyst that defines the search experience for an end user and refines it based on analytics and feedback. They use the Sitecore Search interface to view KPIs, use rules to boost, bury, blacklist, and set up user-centric features.

The following table describes the main interfaces that these roles use, when they use them, and their responsibilities.

Role

Interface used

When

Responsibilities

Search Administrator or Search Engineer

Sitecore Search user interface

After Sitecore sets up a domain.

Defines and configures entities, attributes, sources, widgets, pages, and the features necessary for the search experience.

Search Developer

  • Sitecore Search user interface

  • Search SDK or APIs for integration

After the Search Administrator/Engineer has defined the data objects, indexes them into Sitecore Search, and configures the features.

  • Integrates Search with their organization’s existing website or application

  • Understands APIs, SDLC, system design, and so on.

Search User (Business User/Analyst)

Sitecore Search user interface

After integration and when the implementation starts getting search results and sending events that power analytics in Search.

  • Defines the search experience for an end user.

  • Refines the experience based on keyword, widget, and page analytics, and feedback from the search configurator.

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