[5.0.3] SiteSearch: how to exclude some content and how to get aggregations and suggestions

[Giacomo Petillo]

Hi all,

is there a way to use the "SiteSearch" viewtool with type exclusion? Eg. not show the images, pdf files and other types?

I had added the "DOTCMS_SITESEARCH" UserAgent exclusion before "<img>" tag and set the "Exclude" field with "/application, /resourses/" values, but if i seach a term the search result contains both images and js/css files.

Another question, seems that this viewtool doesn't support the "aggregations" and the "suggestions" options of ES query, it just returns "SiteSearchResults", which doesn't contains that infos. Is there a method?

I must implement a site search, which exclude all the images, pdf (and other types) and returns the categories aggregations for each results, any idea? Is The EsTool the best choice?

Thanks,

G.

[Xander Steinmann]

Hi Giacomo,

If you want basic search then the SiteSearch tool is fine. You can use the DOTCMS_SITESEARCH to not index certain part of pages and the Exclude field to exclude files (I believe it should be /resources/*). If you want to take it a step further you can do the following things:

1. Filter the results you get from the viewtool, for instance to remove all file results
2. Create a custom ES query that returns better results (you can test it in the back-end)
3. Create a plugin that calls the site search methods
4. Completely customize the Elasticsearch and what it returns - this is possible but not recommended

One thing I noticed with the index is that it is never cleaned up, only things are added to it. This means that if a page is indexed and later removed then it will keep popping up. That's why, for one client, we went for option 3 and added code that checks whether results actually exist. We also added a checkbox to pages so the customer can select which pages should turn up in the site search results and which shouldn't.

Kind regards,

Xander

[Giacomo Petillo]

Thank yiu Xander for the suggestions.

The DOTCMS-SITESEARCH user agent exclusion is used for remove some content from rendered pages and works we well!

I studied both docs and source code and i'll upgrade to the 5.3.8.2 (LTS) as soon is possible, because in new SiteSearch viewtool there is "getAggregation" method which is what i need.

N.b. Use che "keywords" meta tag for aggregate over field values or custom values, as showed here: https://dotcms.com/docs/latest/site-search#MetaKeywords

G.