It’s time!!! I mean I cant believe that the time has come for me to blog about Sitecore Search. October last year, at symposium I was really intrigued by Sitecore Search and wanted to play with it. You all know and if you do not, I am an ardent Search lover. My love story with search started while I was pursuing my Masters in Computer Science as I embraced Lucene as my thesis topic. From then and until now, my love story has continued on and that even has awarded me with Coveo Search MVP award. Now, when my other product I am so passionate about (Sitecore) is at the door step of it’s own search journey, I have to get my hands on it, right?
Lets get started! Most important thing first is to understand that Sitecore Search is part of SaaS DXP specifically Content Cloud stack.
To start exploring Sitecore Search, the first step is to reach your Sitecore partner contact or Sitecore representative. They will share a familiar looking form URL (I do not want to share that here as the right thing to do is to reach Sitecore rep :)). The form will ask some basic information like site name, domain, sitemap URL, admin email and crawling method preference for example. Creation of sandbox might take around 10 working days and preference is usually given to real opportunities for all the right reasons.
Now, once the sandbox is ready, an email will be sent with activation instructions. Do note that the email will expire in two days, so, it is important to do it as soon as possible. If it makes it easier, the email comes from ‘no-reply@reflektion.com‘
Tada!!! I was so happy to see the sandbox after the wait. Couple screenshots for reference here. With initial set up, if all goes well there should be some content with some basic information on each content piece on Index. Do note that Sitecore is currently doing lot of efforts to get the UI to better place based on feedback they are getting, but, these are the screenshots from the sandbox I received.
Home/Site Performance
Pages
Widgets
Analytics
Global Resources
Catalog
This section is where you can explore content on the index and check out specific details on the same.
Developer Resources
This section lists customer key, API hosts, API keys and their scope and also throttle limits. It has various tabs within this area that can help developers play with API, monitor events and also some documentation links (These were discover related and not Sitecore Search related)
Administrative Tools
This is the section where you can see domain settings, sources (it usually comes with at least one set up based on what you filled in your form) and a place to manage users.
Source should have all the web crawler settings and we will cover some of those in my later posts.
