The Optimizely Digital Experience Platform contains many features to support you in your daily work. Depending on how your solution is set up, some features described in this documentation may not be available to you. Contact your system administrator to find out more. See Optimizely World for technical information.
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. Optimizely Search & Navigation 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 (SEOStands for "search engine optimization"; making website content attractive to website visitors and, as a result, achieving high rankings in search results.), often referred to as "the process of improving the visibility of website content in the search results."
Optimizely Search & Navigation 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 Optimizely Search & Navigation documentation shows search administrators, such as editors and site administrators, how to set up and use Optimizely Search & Navigation. It also shows developers how to configure and set up search features.
Feature summary
With Optimizely Search & Navigation, you can develop customized functionality, such as filtering and faceted navigation, based on content properties, such as price or color. Optimizely Search & Navigation is based on an index service and interfaces, which can be cloud-based or installed on-premises. Optimizely Search & Navigation supports multiple languages.
Optimizely Search & Navigation indexes any type of website object, not only web pages. As soon as an author publishes content, Optimizely Search & Navigation pushes data to the search engine, making new or updated content available in near real-time.
Features in "standard" Optimizely Search & Navigation
- View and analyze search statistics for your websites, and use the statistics to optimize search.
- Explore the site index to see what was 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 Optimizely Search & Navigation Connections Edition
Optimizely Search & Navigation 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 Order Optimizely Search & Navigation. To learn how to use it, see Adding connectors.
See Getting started for logging in, accessing features, and working with the Optimizely user interface.
Help in Optimizely Search & Navigation
Optimizely Search & Navigation's user interface provides onscreen documentation. To access it, click Show Help in the upper right corner.
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