Unlock your data with the Enonic Explorer enterprise search

An enterprise search solution is software where users can retrieve content from several different sources. There are several ways in which an enterprise search solution can help your business, for instance by boosting team productivity, increasing profitability, and lowering cost by centralizing information.

Now Enonic has released a brand new offering in this regard: Enonic Explorer. This is an enterprise search application that supports collecting and searching across data from different sources. Let’s take a look at how it works and how it is being used by real customers.

Enonic Explorer: How it works

Admin tool

The administration interface for Enonic Explorer enables search operators to set up and configure the enterprise search solution of your organization—both internally and externally. You can control data sources, manage fields, curate synonym lists, and expose the data through different interfaces. The search results can then be delivered through custom front-ends of any kind.

The features of Enonic Explorer are as follows:

• Collections: Unique data sets transferred to Enonic Explorer
• Fields: Define common fields across your different sources, e.g. “First name”
• StopWords: Define words that are irrelevant for or interfering with your search results
• Thesauri: Build synonym lists to match your custom vocabulary
• Interfaces: Search interface for your users, like a combination of specific collections and synonyms

In order to have meaningful and relevant search results, data from different collections can be organized into “Fields.” This feature enables a common set of fields across different sources, and is used to decide where to store data, how to search, and to group data for facets. Standard fields include language, text, and title, but you can also create custom fields.

Enonic Explorer also lets you administer stop words and thesauri for improved search results. Stop words are normally short words that are used excessively throughout all content, and thereby not providing value in terms of weighing search results. Removing them through one or multiple lists in various combinations can enable a cleaner search result.

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The “Thesauri” feature allows you to create synonym lists—for instance a list of specific words from English to German, or medical synonyms—in order to retrieve broader, but still more relevant results. As with stop words, you can use multiple thesauri in different combinations in interfaces.

Now let us take a closer look at “Collections” and “Interfaces.”

Collections

Under “Collections” we can find the unique data sets providing the content foundation for Enonic Explorer—this is consequently the place where you configure how and when to collect data into a collection.

Each collection has a unique name and a collector—an app that collects data. Inside the collection, you set up parameters and prerequisites for collecting content, as well as configuring multiple schedules.

Interfaces

In “Interfaces” everything comes together and determines how your collected data is displayed. A search interface allows you to select which collections and thesauri to combine, as well as the ability to tune and boost your search down to field level.

Each interface has a unique name and must include at least one collection. Filters can be used to avoid search results that do not meet your required quality—for instance: it is normally useful that a search result includes an URI, making it clickable/navigable when displayed.

Other features in “Interfaces” include query—where you can configure a simple fulltext query or group multiple expressions together by a logical expression—result mapping—where you may configure which fields are provided to the front-end—and the mentioned synonyms and stop words.

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Enonic Explorer: How it is used

Norway Post

The enterprise search solution of Norway Post incorporates a faceted search result for end users. When searching for the Norwegian city of “Molde,” you get a faceted result where you can easily browse between all results, editorial content, postal codes, addresses, and post offices related to the search term.

The Norwegian Electronic Health Library

The search solution of the Norwegian Electronic Health Library features even more facets, and is additionally presented with several groups of filters. In this search, end users can choose between sources, information types (like encyclopedias, guidelines, or recommendations), language, and related searches.

Get started

Enonic Explorer is more than just an app, it is a platform. You may extend it with custom collectors and provide custom configuration forms. Additionally, while running on top of Enonic XP, you may also create custom search interfaces and APIs to fit your requirements.

To get started with Enonic Explorer, take a look at the application on Enonic Market or the documentation at the Developer Portal.