Episerver Find introduction

Episerver Find

Episerver Find requires an additional license and an index. See Episerver World for details about installation and configuration. After installation, Find appears on the global menu.

Most site visitors abandon a website if they cannot quickly find what they are looking for. With increasing information volumes, menu navigation is no longer sufficient, so search becomes critical for locating information. Episerver Find adds powerful search functionality to websites. Search encompasses internet search engines (like Bing) and a website's search function.

Search optimization increases the chances of attracting visitors to your website, keeping them there, and getting them to complete an action, such as registering or shopping. This is closely related to search engine optimization (SEOSearch Engine Optimization; making website content attractive to search engines and as a result achieve high rankings in search results.), often referred to as "the process of improving the visibility of website content in the search results."

Episerver Find bases search functionality on visitor search behavior and website statistics. Using this information, you can add automatic landing pages, adaptive navigation, and guided search to increase website traffic and boost conversion rates.

The Find documentation shows search administrators, such as editors and Episerver site administrators, how to set up and use Find; it also shows developers how to configure and set up search features.

Feature summary

With Episerver Find, you can develop customized functionality, such as filtering and faceted navigation, based on content properties, such as price or color. Find is based on an index service and interfaces, which can be cloud-based or installed on-premises. Find supports multiple languages.

Episerver Find indexes any type of website object, not only web pages. As soon as an author publishes content, Find pushes data to the search engine, making new or updated content available in near real-time.

Features in "standard" Find

View and analyze search statistics for your websites, and use the statistics to optimize search.
Explore the site index to see what has been indexed and when, and use this information to customize search features.
Promote selected content (best bets), and manage search phrases without hits.
Add related queries to guide visitors in their search for specific content.
Define synonyms for similar search phrases.
Weight content properties to boost search results as desired.
Support for basic boolean operators like AND, OR, NOT. Special symbols like + and - are currently not supported. Complex nested combinations have limitations.

Features in Find Connections Edition

Episerver Find Connections Edition lets you add connectors, which index external content that is related to but not part of your website. For purchasing information about the Connections Edition, see http://www.episerver.com/Hosting/order-episerver-find/. To learn how to use it, see Adding connectors.

See the Getting started section for information about logging in, accessing features and working with the Episerver user interface.