Working with entities, attributes, and features
Describes the concepts of entities, attributes, and features in Sitecore Search and explains how they work together.
Sitecore Search uses entities and attributes to create representations of your content items in our system. It uses features to optimize searches and display search results. Entities, attributes, and features work together to create customized search experiences for your site visitors.
Entities and attributes
Entities are distinct, search-indexable object types with unique structures that represent different categories of content.
In Search, an entity is a grouping of attributes that represents metadata contained within your content items. For example, the content entity has attributes representing the content type, titles, descriptions, and so on. Attributes always exist inside a single entity, never on their own or in multiple entities.
Every content item on your site is represented in Sitecore Search as an index document, and each of those index documents is indexed to conform to a specific entity spec. This means that every index document has the same attributes as the parent entity, and the attributes in those index documents are populated with data extracted from the content items.
The only entity available is the default content entity, which you can use to represent any content type, such as a blog post, an article, a video, and so on.
Features
Sitecore Search uses a variety of features such as facets and filters, sorting options, and textual relevance to create a customized search experience for your visitors. These features work with attributes to filter, personalize, rank, sort, and find content items.
For example, you might make it possible for visitors to limit search results by the review rating using the content entity attribute, review_rating, with the facet feature.