Search and indexing overview
Overview of the three Sitecore Experience Platform search frameworks: Content, xConnect and Commerce Search.
Sitecore Experience Platform (XP) has three search frameworks:
Content Search, which is used by various components primarily to search and index Sitecore items.
xConnect Search, which is used to search and index experience data.
Commerce Search, which is used to search and index customers and orders.
The following table summarizes the differences between the three search frameworks:
Content Search | xConnect Search | Commerce Search | |
---|---|---|---|
APIs | Sitecore Content Search API | xConnect Client API | |
Providers |
|
|
|
Indexes |
|
|
|
Indexer | indexCrawler (run on the core Sitecore application) | xConnect Search Indexer (run as Windows Service or Web Job) | Commerce Indexing minions |
Note
Many components that use the Content Search have their own API layer on top of the Content Search API. For example, the Marketing Operations API has a method for searching the sitecore_marketing_* and sitecore_marketingdefinitions_* indexes that references the Content Search API further down the stack.
In 9.0, the following indexes are no longer managed by Sitecore Content Search:
sitecore_list_index - replaced by the xDB Collection index
sitecore_analytics_index - replaced by the xDB Collection index
social_messages_master
social_messages_web
For information about configuring content indexes, see Search and Indexing.
For more information about xConnect Search and indexing, refer to the xConnect Search Indexer documentation.
For more information about Commerce Search and indexing, see the Commerce Search plugin