Sitecore Search enhances personalization, analytics, and more

At Sitecore, we strive to improve your digital experience by introducing feature updates that go beyond mere functionalities. In this blog post, we'll dive deep into the new features and updates that Sitecore Search has to offer, including personalized content delivery and location-based search.

Previously, we introduced updates including:

• Smart sorting: To arrange search results based on different factors like popularity or recent activity, giving you more control and customization options for how content is displayed on your website.
• Text analyzer for multi-language precision: Intelligent tailoring of text relevance configurations for diverse languages.
• Crawler configuration control: Leverage enhanced configuration options for a hassle-free crawling process, including optional delays and cookie disabling. This prevents potential lockouts and guarantees a successful crawl preventing website navigation issues.

Learn more about Smart sorting, Analyzers and Indexing Content.

While we keep innovating Sitecore Search to address customer needs, our roadmap continues to highlight two main fronts of investment:

• Market-leading content merchandising across every touchpoint and interaction with built-in AI and self-service tooling.
• Turn-key onboarding and deployment of Sitecore Search, no matter where your content resides.

New features that provide an improved site search experience for your customers include direct document management, precision-powered personalization, geolocation, efficient data processing, real-time insights, and Sitecore Search training.

Direct document management in Content Collection

This freshly released feature, developed from customer feedback, improves the content management experience in Sitecore Search. It allows users to seamlessly add, update, and manage documents directly from the user-friendly interface of the Customer Engagement Console (CEC).

Business users can now manually add documents to the Content Collection by selecting the source tied to each document and filling in only the necessary fields. This addresses common scenarios where users lack technical expertise or need to urgently promote content without waiting for technical assistance.

Users can not only add documents manually but also customize their appearance in specific widgets tied to a particular source. This feature offers flexibility, allowing users to choose whether the document should persist despite scheduled runs, ensuring users have control over the content displayed in their search experience.

Read more here

Precision-powered personalization

Sitecore Search introduces a groundbreaking update that helps personalize content with segment support, designed to change the way you connect with your audience.

This feature empowers you to create dynamic segments from your Customer Data Platform (CDP), opening the door to a highly personalized approach to content delivery. By crafting segments directly from your CDP, you can align your content strategy precisely with the needs and behaviors of each segment, ensuring relevance in every interaction.

Read more about personalized search here 

Craft tailored experiences with geolocation

Sitecore Search's geolocation feature update goes beyond conventional personalization. This update is a strategic advantage that allows you to create highly targeted and location-specific experiences.

The feature can recommend content specific to the user's geographic location. Whether it's showcasing local events, promotions, or region-specific information, this functionality ensures that your audience receives content that resonates with their immediate surroundings.

Geolocation also allows you to sort search results based on user proximity. By highlighting the most popular or recent content based on the user's location, the relevance of search results improves. This ensures that users are presented with content that aligns with the current trends and activities in their vicinity, increasing engagement with your website content.

You can also tailor your promotional efforts by designing promotions that are not only location-specific but also attuned to the preferences of users in that area. Whether it's a special offer for a particular city or a promotion tied to a local event, this feature amplifies the impact of your promotional campaigns by aligning them with the interests of your audience in specific geographic locations.

Efficient data processing

Sitecore Search now offers two new, efficient data processing techniques with powerful source connectors, API Push and API Crawler. This feature guarantees accelerated indexing, deeper analytics insights, and effortless troubleshooting capabilities, making your data more accessible and versatile than ever before.

The API Push and API Crawler act as powerful connectors, expediting the journey of your data into the Sitecore Search ecosystem. API Push enables seamless data transmission in JSON format, while the API Crawler efficiently crawls REST API endpoints, ensuring a smooth and rapid influx of information.

With these new connectors, Sitecore Search reduces indexing times, making your data flow effortlessly into the system, reducing latency, and ensuring that your content is indexed rapidly. The system also utilizes the wealth of data processed through the API Push and API Crawler, providing a holistic view of your content's impact.

Learn more about this update here.

Real-time insights with analytics

Another great feature update is the ability to provide real-time insights about your configured sources. This ensures that you have immediate access to valuable information during the re-crawl and re-indexing processes.

Users can directly access analytics details from the Sources details page, offering an immediate and detailed view of the health and performance of their configured sources. This eliminates the need to navigate through multiple interfaces, providing a centralized hub for quick insights. Real-time insights can also be accessed from the Analytics section under Sources Overview in the Customer Engagement Console (CEC), providing a centralized monitoring dashboard.

Learn more about it here.

Comprehensive Sitecore Search training

Finally, we're excited to announce our first-ever training content for Sitecore Search. The training content is thoughtfully curated, providing learning paths for developers and marketing managers to familiarize themselves with Sitecore Search.

The primary goal of this comprehensive resource is to enable users to maximize the potential of Sitecore Search – from harnessing its diverse capabilities, to understanding best practices and terminology.

Training material can be accessed by registering on Sitecore's Learning Platform.

Other significant updates

• Multi-entity content: The concept of multi-entity will unlock more advanced content use cases, allowing you to categorize and present objects in different groups and enabling cross-attribution.
• Optimizing source management: Gain more control over scanning and indexing jobs, making source management more efficient.

A sneak peek at new updates in development

In our ongoing pursuit of innovation, we're actively exploring enhancements for Sitecore Search that leverage additional generative AI capabilities. Currently undergoing rigorous testing include some key features like:

• Answering site visitor questions with a constrained version of Open AI, with your brand's content and custom override rules.
• Ability to tailor Sitecore Search results based on customer questions.
• Contextual text generation.

Stay tuned for more exciting updates in Sitecore Search. The future of Sitecore Search is brighter than ever, and we can't wait to explore it with you - keep searching and excelling with Sitecore!