What is Enterprise Search (Elasticsearch)?

Enterprise Search is a dedicated enterprise search software from WordPress VIP that offers feature-rich search capabilities to help your employees and customers find content, files, and other data faster, without compromising website performance. 

How Enterprise Search works

Enterprise Search offloads search queries to a dedicated service that rapidly looks for matches in an index, ranks them, and displays the results on the screen—all of this happens within milliseconds. Let’s look at each of the moving parts:

• Indexing: Indexing is the process by which data is compiled and inserted into Enterprise Search. You can choose what to index and what not to during the initial setup process. Once you create an index, Enterprise Search automatically keeps it updated in real time based on trigger events (for example, when you publish a new page, it is automatically indexed).
• Data Types: Enterprise Search can index from various internal and customer-facing data types in WordPress to provide authorization-based search functionality based on user permissions. This includes content from your content hub, media files, user accounts, products, product metadata, and more.
• Query Processing: When a user enters a search query, Enterprise Search intercepts it and offloads it to a separate, containerized service. The service analyzes the query and breaks it down into individual search terms to look for matches in the index.
• Search Algorithms: Enterprise Search uses text-matching algorithms to look for items in the index that contain the search terms, and ranks the items using ranking algorithms. Various similarity, proximity, natural language processing (NLP), and other types of algorithms are used.
• Ranking and Relevance: Items are ranked based on relevance. A ranking algorithm assigns “relevance scores” to the items, and Enterprise Search displays the search results highest-score-first. You can tune the relevancy to your needs based on recency, popularity, and even custom metrics.
• User Experience: Enterprise Search provides a host of customizable quality-of-life features that improve search experience. For example, you can configure faceting to provide refined, filter-based search, or add fuzzy matching, which handles typos to enable “Did you mean?” type suggestions.

Why use Enterprise Search?

• Easy to set up and go: Enterprise Search can be easily enabled with a couple of lines of code and is fully managed by WordPress VIP.

• Develop and test: You can use Enterprise Search on pre-production environments in the cloud as well as on-prem to develop and test features before deploying to production sites.

• Multisite search: Enterprise Search can be used on multisites to powerfully execute search queries across entire networks of sites.

How Enterprise Search helps businesses

Today, brands are working with more files and data than ever before. Enterprise Search allows you to search faster and boost business efficiency—all while benefiting website performance rather than at its expense.

Tech companies use Enterprise Search to help developers find documentation and data faster, speeding up development cycles and product launches.

Government agencies use Enterprise Search to help staffers quickly and securely access vast internal stores of legislative and regulatory documents, while keeping public records openly downloadable—speeding up policy development as well as timely public information sharing.

Media companies use Enterprise Search to help journalists, editors, and analysts sift through decades of media assets and information across web properties, enabling them to publish faster.

Ecommerce stores use Enterprise Search to provide fast, synonym-aware search that can be personalized to increase conversion rates and customer satisfaction.

Customer support teams use Enterprise Search to find documents faster and reduce time to resolution. On the front end, customers can find support articles and solve issues on their own, bringing down the number of support requests.

Websites in general implement Enterprise Search to boost performance by reducing server load through offloaded search queries, helping SEO rankings as well as customer satisfaction.

In summary, Enterprise Search provides fast, secure, and intuitive search experiences that boost website performance and increase operational efficiency.

How Enterprise Search can optimize your site

WordPress VIP’s Enterprise Search is a secure, customizable, cloud-based search solution built on top of Elasticsearch, a powerful open-source search engine software. Included as part of the WordPress VIP platform, Enterprise Search helps boost website performance while offering fast and feature-rich search across millions of content and media files. Read the documentation to find out how to enable Enterprise Search and its features and learn more about the WordPress VIP platform.