Evolution

Amar Chokhawala founded Reflektion who was a pioneering member of the Google AdSense team, he was instrumental in conceiving and implementing core technologies that are integral to its widespread adoption today. Furthermore, Amar made significant contributions to Gmail user modeling, leveraging semantic learning and advanced technologies to enhance search results and other applications that let him to establish Reflektion in 2012 and subsequently acquired by Sitecore in 2021, undergoing a rebranding as Sitecore Discover. Following this acquisition and rebranding, Sitecore Search was launched in 2022.

Difference

Sitecore Discover

Commerce search with Powerful AI-driven product search and merchandizing solution, enables businesses to deliver personalized commerce experiences.
e.g: https://www.biglots.com

Sitecore Search

Content search targeted for marketing websites. Predict search intent and display individualized results with a next-gen content discovery solution.
e.g: https://www.sitecore.com/search

What is Sitecore Search?

Sitecore Search is a powerful and versatile search product, that allows organizations to implement search capabilities on their websites and digital properties, enabling users to quickly find relevant content or information. The three main components of Sitecore Search are as follows.

Customer Engagement Console (CEC)

Your one-stop shop for search analytics, tests, configuration, and more. The Sitecore search cloud portal that is used to configure search.

Search & recommendations service

An AI-based REST API for performing search queries and receiving results.

Event service

A REST API for collecting visitor interactions which are key to optimizing the search experience.

Platform Capablities

Unified Index

Different sources are crawled and stored in an unified index that allows for faster and more efficient searching that eliminates the need to querying multiple indexes.

Multi locale

Integrate several languages into your search for streamlined management and global relevance.

Personalization

Personalize with ease by considering visitor behavior and presenting the right content tailored to their needs. Displays search results based on a user's search history and behavior on the website.

Split Testing

Conduct multivariate tests A/B and leverage variations to identify the most effective content for each audience segment.

Context and Rules engine

Rules engine is used to Boost/Bury/Blacklist results with the site or user context, which improves and helps with better user experience.

Privacy Compliance

Support for CCPA and GDPR Deletion requests at the platform level.

Multi region hosting

Support hosting in multiple regions for better performance also to support privacy compliance for certain regions.

Features

Suggestions

Provides suggested search queries based on user input on the search input.

Preview suggestions

Deliver quick, predictive search results by suggesting relevant keywords as users type, exceeding their needs within milliseconds.

Match Highlighting

Highlighting emphasizes the search term(s) in the results.

Search Ranking

Boost certain certain results to appear higher in the search result, by boosting the results or burrying the results.

Synonyms

Enhance search precision and user experience by linking related terms. Either by one way, Two way synonym or replacement.

Sorting

Allows users to narrow search results based on specific criteria.

Facet and Filtering

Allows users to narrow search results based on specific criteria.

Content Recommendations

Personalize the web journey with instant searches, activating a range of tailored page content in real-time.

Textual Relevance

Improve the relevance by giving priority to attributes of a search result.

Measuring Search Performance

• Key performance indicators (KPIs) for evaluating search effectiveness
• Leveraging Analytics to monitor user search behavior
• Using data insights to make data-driven improvements
• Top keywords and no results to identify the Content Gap

Ref:

https://www.sitecore.com/products/search
https://developers.sitecore.com/search
https://developers.sitecorecloud.io/search-sdk/react/latest/storybook/index.html
https://doc.sitecore.com/search/en/developers/search-and-recommentation-api/index.html

Credit:

Photo by Casey Horner on Unsplash