Site search in Umbraco

Site search can fulfill a number of important functions on a website, from enabling site visitors to navigate your site by keyword search, improving the performance of sites by providing fast access to load content into a template, and enabling Editors to search for posts they've created.

Umbraco has a built in version of the popular open source search engine Lucene.Net, which is a fast and effective search tool. This Umbraco search engine is marketed as Umbraco Examine.

The primary function of Examine is to provide onsite search out of the box. Examine is configured to index all published content on a site including all fields using default data types in all multilingual languages supported by a site. Site developers can implement a basic keyword search using just a few lines of custom code. Search result pages can be configured to exclude certain document types from the search results, or to hide pages when an editor has chosen to suppress a page.

Indexes can also be extended to include content from third party sources, such as Zendesk, as well as content stored in the Media library such as PDFs and Word Documents.

Examine also provides a search interface in the back end of Umbraco, to make it easier for an Editor to find content they have previously created.

Examine indexes in Umbraco also have the benefit of being a super fast copy of Umbraco data and can be used by Developers to substantially improve site performance, which is a critical ranking factor for Google.