Search engine

eZ publish comes with a built-in search engine which integrates tightly with the content structure. It is capable of indexing everything that is inputted through the native content model.

In eZ Publish, a content class describes the actual data structures (for example news articles, products, etc.). The classes are built up of attributes which are represented by datatypes. An attribute can be the title of an article, the price of a product and so on. It is possible to control which attributes that should be indexed by the search engine. This can be done by making use of the "Searchable" checkboxes while editing a class.

When an object is published, the attributes that are marked searchable will be indexed by the search engine. It will then be possible to use the search interface to find words or phrases that are a part of the published content. For example, if the user searches for "backpack", the system will return a list of all kinds of objects where the word "backpack" occurs.

Binary files in a webdav repository, such as pdf or Mm Word document can be indexed too in eZ publish by using a pdft

Advanced search

The advanced search interface makes it possible tweak and narrow the search. The following features are supported:

• Search for several words at the same time (for example "car bike train").
• Search for an exact phrase (for example "cheap cars in Scandinavia").
• Class level filtering (limit the search to a specific class).
• Attribute level filtering (search only a specific attribute).
• Tree level filtering (limit the search to a part of the node tree).
• Section filtering (limit the search to objects that belong to a certain section).
• Time filtering (yesterday, last week/month/3-months/year).

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This search will return all employee who's firstname is 'junior'.

To go even futher, the Extension eZ find can add relevance ranking and Keyword highlighting

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Search statistics

The setup part of the administration interface provides access to a page that reveals information about words/phrases that have been searched along with the average results that have been returned. The following screenshot shows the search statistics interface.

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