Implementing full text search with Tridion Query

Question

I have to implement full-ext search for website based on SDL Tridion WCMS. Any suggestions or an idea how to implement full text search using Tridion Query?

Answer 1

The SDL Tridion Content Delivery API is designed for retrieval of content based on system or custom metadata and/or taxonomy. The full text is not available via the API for searching. To implement a full text site search on a Tridion site it is normal to use/integrate a separate search engine, such as Google Site Search or one of the Lucene based solutions. The best integrations usually use a storage extension to notify the search indexer when content has changed.

See How can we integrate Microsoft FAST with SDL Tridion 2011 SP1? and Extending Content Delivery Storage in SDL Tridion 2011 for some ideas/examples.

Answer 2

If your site is accessible to a Google bot, Google Site Search is easy.

You might also look to the app server for your full text search (for instance its in a .NET/SQL environment).

If you want an enterprise search platform, check out the open source Solr. With Java, .Net and JavaScript APIs and a REST-based server/service, this open source option is worth taking a long look.

Not to go too far off topic, but this helped me visualize when I was answering the same question for the first time: site search means three things. One, a search engine; two, a search schema/index (decide what the beast eats and feed it); three, a search user interface.