Integrate external search providers with EPiServer

Mårten Berg

Vote:

A customer wants to know more about changing the regular EPiServer search provider to a solution using either Google Site Search or Microsoft Search Server.

My questions are: How complex is it to make these unintegrated search providers conform to EPiServer page property values? Say for instance, that I want to search pages within a given time span, such as course start and stop dates, or properties containing free text or category values. I'm guessing metadata will come into play somehow, but I have yet to find out how to make Google or Microsoft parse these values.

The customer is using EPiServer 4.6x so unfortunately the epicode provider EasySearch is not an option, otherwise I would probably have recommended that one.

Any pointers and recommendations would be most appreciated!
Regards,
/Marten

#32856

Sep 22, 2009 9:22

Erik Nordin Wahlberg

Vote:

Never tried Google Site Search, but using MSS atm.

With MSS you add the data you want to be able to search as metadata, make som configurations and you'll be able to search that data. A problem that I've bumped into is that alla meta data crawled is saved as text, and it seems like you can't change it in the admin interface. So i'm not sure how it will handle timespan searches and sorting by int/datetime etc..

Another thing you could try is Google Mini...

If you are interested in MSS Ted Nyberg has two posts about it on his blog http://www.tednyberg.com

#32859

Sep 22, 2009 9:55

Vote:

Hi!

I think most search servers has the ability to pick-up meta data inside the html head-tag.

I use this strategy successfylly to be able to construct more advanced queries with Siteseeker.

#32860

Sep 22, 2009 10:02

Mårten Berg

Vote:

Ted Nyberg's posts on MSS was very informative.

The problem with the time span search can possibly be intervened within the search results presentation, if not before. Not the prettiest solution, but it will do for now.

Thanks for your responses.
/Marten

#32864

Sep 22, 2009 10:53

Rajesh Shelar

Vote:

Hi,

Can you give me the links for Ted Nyberg's posts on MSS

Not able to find them

Namaste

Rajesh

#41031

Edited, Jun 29, 2010 16:41

Vote:

This is old, but I wrote it to integrate a site with a Google Mini. It might help.

http://world.episerver.com/Blogs/Deane-Barker/Dates/2009/9/EPiServerSearchMeta/

#41036

Edited, Jun 29, 2010 20:37