Remember the last business application you stopped using because you could never find the content you were looking for? Well, I do remember a couple of those. Not that they didn’t contain useful content, but in those cases the search feature was so inefficient that it would take forever to find the right content, not to mention the frustration of having to browse through the results one by one just to realize that none are relevant! Whatever the application is, we all expect the searches to be as easy and efficient as Google search!
Search in Nuxeo
Search has always been a core feature of the Nuxeo Platform and we are committed to meet the highest standards and deliver the best user experience in that field. Starting from version 6.0, the Nuxeo Platform has embedded elasticsearch, one of the leading search engine technologies. This opened a wide range of new possibilities for users such as faceted search, fuzzy search, synonyms search, geo distance search, etc. We went further than just adding elasticsearch to the Nuxeo platform as a new standalone feature, we plugged it into our query API, secure content management system, and UI framework and made everything configurable with Nuxeo Studio.
Here are a few examples of what you can now build with the Nuxeo Platform:
- Facets:
Faceted search is a well known feature made popular by e-commerce sites that enables users to refine keyword searches with filters (facets) computed dynamically from the current results set. Typical examples include price ranges, brands, item category, etc. You can get more details about faceted search in the Nuxeo platform in this blog post.
Faceted search in Nuxeo - User is searching for claims containing “car accident”. There are 3 facets: claim type, claim status and due date
Read about the Future of Claims Management here >
- Fuzzy query or proximity search:
Fuzzy query enables Nuxeo users to search for terms without knowing the exact spelling. It’s a lot more advanced than just filtering accent or plurals.
| For example, a search for contnt would match documents containing content |
- Synonyms:
Elasticsearch can be configured to use synonyms dictionaries. So when one searches for a given term, the search engine will return results which match the term and its synonyms
| Let’s say, we have a dictionary where the words content, data and information are synonyms. A search for content management will match:
- content management platform
- information management platform
data management platform
|
Highlighting:
Highlighting provides a short piece of text from each result in order to give more information about the context and help users quickly understand why the document appeared in the search results. This will help users assess the relevance of the document better.
| _For example, a search for “content management” could return the following results:__Nuxeo_description.pdf_
Designed by developers for developers, the Nuxeo Platform is a highly customizable and extensible content management platform for building business applications.
The Nuxeo Platform is the company’s flagship product, a “highly customizable and extensible content management platform for building business applications”. FT 7.1 follows …
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All those features constitute a tremendous improvement in terms of user experience. But wait, there is more! As it turns out, elasticsearch is also great at analytics and can help power users gain insights into their application content by creating dashboards. The easiest way to create dashboards is to use Kibana, the front-end application provided by elasticsearch.
Example of a Kibana dashboard created with data from a Nuxeo application
What’s Next ?
Very soon we will introduce other major innovations, such as a passthrough API, which will enable our users to use the native elasticsearch query DSL through the Nuxeo Platform, thus getting the best of both worlds: being able to leverage the full extent of elasticsearch capabilities and also benefiting from the authentication and permission framework of the Nuxeo Platform. We also plan to introduce a new set of widgets, like pie charts and bar diagrams, which will enable users to build their own dashboards within the Nuxeo platform UI! With these features that we have already introduced and those that we plan to incorporate, Nuxeo Search will be easy and efficient providing you the best user experience!