This post also appears on the Headscape site.

Website search can often be a thorny subject. Expectations of search capabilities have been set very high by search engines. The default search offered by content management systems (CMSs) is often a bit basic by comparison. For example, the results are often not the most relevant to the search term used because the CMS is only offering a simple “does this page contain this word” method.

Our discovery work for the Competition Appeal Tribunal site revealed a specialised set of search requirements. When working with a CMS, I’m a firm believer that you go with the flow of its strong and weak points, and try not to fight it. With that philosophy in mind, my instinct was not to struggle to make native CMS search fit the requirements but rather to develop a custom solution for this site.

We opted for Elasticsearch, which is described as a “RESTful search and analytics engine”, combined with the very well maintained and documented Elasticsearch PHP library.

As soon as you put some data into Elasticsearch it does a good job of returning relevant results. But where it really excels is when you begin to fine tune it to your needs.

As an example, there is a field on the site that we needed to be able to perform full text searches and sorts. This can be accomplished by duplicating the field into two different “types” allowing one to have all of the full text search capabilities whilst the other is used for sorting.

On another project for US law firm Buckley Sandler (that is built on Drupal), the different content types and fields did not all have the same relevance in search results. By applying a “boost” to specific content types and fields we were able to deliver the most relevant results to users.  Whilst Drupal’s native search API does allow a boost to be applied to certain fields, using Elasticsearch we were able to boost specific content types, individual pages and taxonomy terms.

This level of customisation may not be required on your project, but if it is I highly recommend trying Elasticsearch as I’m confident it can meet your needs.