Search and indexing overview

Abstract

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	Commerce Search Service
Providers	Solr Azure Search	Solr Azure Search	Solr SolrCloud Azure Search
Indexes	sitecore_core_index sitecore_master_index sitecore_web_index sitecore_marketingdefinitions_master sitecore_marketingdefinitions_web sitecore_marketing_asset_index_master sitecore_marketing_asset_index_web sitecore_testing_index sitecore_suggested_test_index sitecore_fxm_master_index sitecore_fxm_web_index	xdb xdb_rebuild	Customer Scope index Order Scope index Catalog Items Scope index
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

Content Search

For information about configuring content indexes, see Search and Indexing.

xConnect Search

For more information about xConnect Search and indexing, refer to the xConnect Search Indexer documentation.

Commerce Search

For more information about Commerce Search and indexing, see the Commerce Search plugin