Today, I am going to explain about the recommended best indexing practices for successfully implementing search for your website using Sitecore Search.
It is necessary to have proper indexing for efficient data retrieval and maintaining a seamless user experience. Effective indexing is crucial for optimizing search functionalities within Sitecore implementations. Here are key recommendations a developer must ensure so that the search implementation is optimized for performance and accuracy.
1. Define Triggers and Schedules
Just before performing the item indexing, establish a detailed and clear indexing plan that details precise triggers and schedules. This methodical approach guarantees accurate and timely updates without putting unnecessary burdens on the system. It is important to note that frequent recrawling or re-indexing should be avoided because doing so can cause delays when processing unchanged data.
2. Validate Your Items
It is important to periodically validate the configuration and performance of the source items to ensure that the Search implementation meets the indexing needs. By conducting routine checks and assessments of the source items a developers can identify the inconsistencies, optimize the search functionality, and make necessary adjustments to improve overall search accuracy and performance.
3. Update or Delete Only After a Successful Run
To prevent issues with incremental updates or deletions, ensure that at least one successful indexing is completed of all source items. This will help guarantee data integrity, prevent data loss, maintain data consistency, and avoid processing errors caused by incomplete or failed indexing attempts.
4. Preprocess Metadata
It is better that you utilize the analyzers and extractors to preprocess the metadata before starting the indexing process as the use of properly formatted metadata for output reduces the browser processing time and increases the efficiency and accuracy.
5. Always Overestimate URLs to be Crawled
It is recommended to set the maximum number of URLs (MAX URLS) in the crawler settings to a number greater than the estimated number of URLs. This will help in preventing a crawler from stopping before the execution of all the URLs is completed.
6. Create Multiple Taggers
For a document extractor, it is suggested to create multiple taggers where each tagger is linked to a unique tag. In this way, each tagger can generate a set of index documents which will ensure structured data extraction. This approach will also lead to the creation of multiple rules where each rule defines the extraction logic for one attribute allowing flexibility and accuracy in capturing the required relevant information.
7. Use Wildcard Symbols
You can utilize the wildcard symbol (*) to create a glob expression that helps in matching multiple URLs by a URL pattern. The symbol or character stands for any amount of characters. This technique simplifies configurations by eliminating the need to list numerous URLs individually.
8. Re-index or Recrawl
It is important to understand the scenarios for re-indexing or recrawling as for most of the Sitecore Search implementations for content or commerce, it is common for searchable items to change or to be updated with the period of time. You can create rules to exclude items with an expiry date but in some other cases, you will need to re-index or recrawl the item.
Re-indexing: Re-index the data when there are changes to the domain-level search configuration settings. This can include changes to analyzers, entities, sorting, and facet options, among others.
Recrawling: Recrawl the data when the settings in the source or indexing mechanism have been changed. This can include edits to extractors, entity settings, and tags, among others.
It is also important to note that re-indexing and recrawling can affect the speed and accuracy of data updates.
By implementing some of these best practices an organization can enhance the efficiency and accuracy of the search using Sitecore Search indexing processes, leading to improved search performance and user satisfaction.
References
Best practices for indexing - https://doc.sitecore.com/search/en/users/search-user-guide/best-practices-for-indexing.html
Mastering Website Content Indexing with​ Sitecore Search - https://enlightenwithamit.hashnode.dev/content-indexing-with-sitecore-search
That's All For Today,
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