What Is Sitecore Search?

Sitecore Search is an AI-powered search engine that provides customers with personalized search results. According to Statista, almost 30% of all global web traffic is generated through online search, making it a vital aspect of customer buying.

As a global leader in digital experience management, Sitecore has made several acquisitions to help provide the best possible digital experience for businesses and customers. One of those was acquiring the AI-Powered digital search platform, Reflektion in 2021.

The goal when Reflektion was acquired was to help marketers solve the problem of information overload, a characteristic of traditional search solutions, which makes it difficult for customers to select the right product.

Now they have accomplished that with the unveiling of Sitecore Search. We’ll explain more about Sitecore Search, what it means for the ever-evolving digital experience, and what will happen to previous search integrations such as Coveo.

Sitecore Search: What it is and How it Works

Sitecore Search is an AI-Powered search tool that predicts search intent and displays individualized results to deliver a personalized search experience.

Sitecore Search offers the best search experience for customers. It enables companies using Sitecore to engage, educate, and empower shoppers to make faster purchase decisions - increasing customer confidence, long-term revenue, and overall customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Announced at Sitecore Symposium 2022, Sitecore Search will enable customers to discover hyper-relevant content, no matter what content type is required, from text to video. It leverages “predictive, type-ahead capabilities that help users find results faster and an AI engine that amplifies specific content based on strategic business objectives or in response to customer feedback.”

Currently, personalized search for Sitecore is provided via an integration with Coveo, which offers native indexing capabilities and out-of-the-box search controls as part of the platform digital experience platform, Sitecore XP.

Read More: Sitecore DXP: What Lies Ahead for Sitecore Customers?

Coveo: Advanced Personalized Search for Sitecore and its Benefits

Coveo for Sitecore offers advanced Search and relevance to improve personalized Search within Sitecore sites. Coveo empowers you with self-learning AI-powered search, personalization, and recommendations.

By integrating personalization and Search together, companies can offer the most valuable information based on visitor preferences while still being able to increase visibility for promoted site content or products. Coveo’s key benefits include the following:

• More Customer Conversion

  Coveo for Sitecore analyzes trends, shapes search result weighting and predicts what content will be most relevant to each visitor by automatically learning the many patterns visitors take to access information. Coveo for Sitecore considers all behavior and blends business logic with ML.

• Fully Integrated

  Coveo for Sitecore is completely integrated with Sitecore XP and works out-of-the-box with Sitecore xDB, experience editor, and many more. Since the Coveo command center is located inside the dashboard, the seamless integration results in quick implementation and an exponential increase in the impact of Sitecore sites.

• Empower Teams to be More Agile

  The more you integrate systems into your martech stack, the more efficient your team will become since they can operate under a single interface. With high-end box usage analytics, machine learning, and AI built-in, Coveo enables teams to quickly get up and running with powerful search analytics that can help identify content gaps and dead ends for content. Search intent data can be integrated with experience analytics to get closer to a 360-degree view of the customer.

• Accelerate Marketing Organization Growth

  For marketing teams, the need to assess, brainstorm, and produce content combined with the manual delivery of personalization can lead to bottlenecks and hinder growth. Marketing teams can reduce the time to value for and lower infrastructure management costs by integrating the features of Sitecore and Coveo to capture real-time deep consumer insights while also utilizing AI/ML to discover visitor trends and needs. This frees up funds that can be used for expansion.

Due to the importance of Search in today’s customer experience, incorporating sophisticated search features can drastically lower friction for users and help them find information. Companies can offer personalized search-to-conversion experiences with Coveo for Sitecore and convert the most valuable site visitors into customers.

Sitecore Search Features

While Coveo for Sitecore will remain highly relevant for those using Sitecore XP, companies utilizing the legacy Sitecore solution will alternatively be able to use Sitecore Search, which comes with several out-of-the-box features. Additionally, those opting to embrace Sitecore’s composable DXP solution will also be able to leverage the power of Sitecore Search.

• Fast Search: You can suggest valuable content as visitors type and observe the visitor’s journey in real-time within milliseconds.

• Content Elevation: Sitecore Search allows you to understand and act upon each visitors’ intent through AI and context-aware rules in real time.

• Controlled Experience: Sitecore Search is equipped with rich APIs and components that allow developers to seamlessly integrate content search, guided navigation, and promotion into any site.

• Deep Content Insights: With Sitecore Search, you can go beyond URLs and clicks to measure customer engagement with themes and keywords across your content.

• Easy Implementation: You can easily create a search experience across multiple numbers of digital assets, which you can organize and optimize specifically for your audience.

• Multilingual Management: Sitecore Search makes it easy to include many languages in your search to simplify management and global relevance.

Why Enterprise Companies Are Choosing Sitecore Search

Sitecore Search enables businesses to deliver a unique personalized search and purchase experience for their customers.

• Easy-to-find Content: Sitecore Search enables companies to customize how content is being matched, sorted, and promoted to mirror the particular needs of your search experience.

• Increased Visitor Engagement: The goal of every company that wants to grow and drive sales is increased visitor engagement on the company site. With Sitecore Search, companies can curate AI-based rules to improve specific content based on business goals or in response to customer feedback. This will, in turn, increase visitors’ engagement on the website.

• Display Results Fast: Human attention spans are shorter than ever. Therefore, even a slow search results display could send a visitor and potential customer away. With Sitecore Search, companies can provide visitors with super fast predictive, type-ahead Search, all backed by an out-of-the-box AI-assisted personalization tool.

Navigate the Latest Sitecore Product Offerings With the Help of Oshyn

Sitecore consistently works toward providing the best digital experience for customers through numerous upgrades, incorporations, and acquisitions. The latest, Sitecore Search, empowers companies to offer the best-personalized search experience for customers on Sitecore sites, helping them reach their goals.

However, these latest product announcements may leave companies wondering whether to stick with their existing Sitecore XP, a complete digital experience platform, or embrace Sitecore’s composable DXP and everything that comes with it. As Sitecore opts for solutions like Sitecore Search, Sitecore XM, and others, it could mean a complete overhaul of existing Sitecore infrastructure to move towards composability.

Oshyn is a certified Sitecore partner with years of experience working with Sitecore and is keenly attuned to market shifts and the latest Sitecore products. If you’re currently embracing a migration toward Sitecore XP or wondering if you need to cancel your current plans and pivot toward a composable DXP option, there’s no need to panic. With our vast amount of Sitecore services and expertise, we can help you figure out how to incorporate Sitecore Search and navigate the latest products from Sitecore.

Check out our Sitecore Development and Integration services to learn more about Oshyn’s Sitecore expertise.