- We can search a lot of things using Elasticsearch / SOLR or similar appliances by Google etc. but we can’t load everything in memory generally. It will simply overwhelm the heap and the processing engine with lot of calculations depending on type of system.
- That necessitates us to device proper UX / UI with below points:
- Filter by timeline sliders.
- Use lazy loading from backend where possible.
- Restrict background results so that front end system is not overwhelmed.
- Give advanced filtering capabilities by date, time, topic, NLP / semantic search, AI prompting and so on.
- Be careful of ASC / DESC sorting and deep pagination.
- Focus on boosting / accuracy / indexing / relevance / shards / full text search / caching / top queries / optimizations / categorization-based search / metrics measurement / relevance / privacy / security and so on.
- What is important is to search everything but not return everything.
- Search should be as specific as possible.
- If you want all results in a return result, then search is not the optimal solution, better work with caching / DB / in-memory products / etc.
- Email me: Neil@HarwaniSytems.in
- Website: www.HarwaniSystems.in
- Blog: www.TechAndTrain.com/blog
- LinkedIn: Neil Harwani | LinkedIn
Category Archives: Search
Elasticsearch with Liferay – Notes & Links – Part 1
Below are the important notes & links for configuring Liferay DXP with Elasticsearch.
- Configuring Elasticsearch – Liferay Help Center – DXP 7.0
- Installing Elasticsearch – Liferay Learn – DXP latest
- Securing Elasticsearch 6.5 with X-Pack – Liferay Help Center – DXP 7.0 with ES 6.5
- Securing Elasticsearch – Liferay Learn – DXP 7.0/7.1/7.2/7.3/7.4 latest with ES 6/7
- Your important files & keywords: jvm.options.d , setenv.sh , elasticsearch.yml , PEM , PKCS#12 , TLS , SSL , keystore , x-pack , osgi config files
- Note:
- Liferay provides enterprise Elasticsearch premium / paid option with monitoring & replication as well.
- Also, check the Liferay Elasticsearch compatibility matrix always.
- When you use connector for Elasticsearch 7 with older DXP Liferay pre 7.3 make sure to blacklist your Elasticsearch 6 connector.
- Make sure to increase your memory allocation (Heap size) of Elasticsearch to right value before moving to production. Some variables are not for production settings and are documented in links provided in various documentation.
- Monitoring Elasticsearch – Liferay Learn
- Cross Cluster Replication – Liferay Learn
- Search Administration and Tuning – Liferay Learn
- Installing and Upgrading a Search Engine – Liferay Learn
- Search Engine Compatibility Matrix – Liferay Help Center
- Configuring Elasticsearch | Elasticsearch Guide [8.6] | Elastic – Refer the right version of Elasticsearch for your Liferay version
Email me: Neil@HarwaniSystems.in
Notes on Liferay search optimization – Part 1
Notes on Liferay search optimization – Part 1.
There are two parts to search optimization in Liferay. One is the internal search and other is the SEO / Digital Marketing for content. Below, I am sharing concepts and keywords to explore for both areas.
Liferay internal search:
- Search BluePrints
- Search Insights
- Custom Indexers
- Tags & Categories
- ReIndexing
- Facets
- Suggestions
- Boosting
- Sorting
- Low level search
- Search Options
- Similar Results
- Queries & Filters
- Google Search console / Bing search console / Google Analytics analysis and feedback into internal search
Liferay SEO:
- Open Graph
- Friendly URLs
- SiteMap
- Robots
- Meta Tags
- LightHouse / PageSpeed Insights score
- Google Analytics
- PIWIK
- Headless
References:
- https://learn.liferay.com/dxp/latest/en/using-search/liferay-enterprise-search/search-experiences/creating-and-managing-search-blueprints.html
- https://learn.liferay.com/dxp/latest/en/using-search/getting-started/search-overview.html
- https://learn.liferay.com/dxp/latest/en/using-search/getting-started/searching-for-content.html
- https://help.liferay.com/hc/en-us/articles/360029046411-Building-Search-Queries-and-Filters
- https://learn.liferay.com/dxp/latest/en/site-building/site-settings/configuring-open-graph.html
- https://learn.liferay.com/dxp/latest/en/site-building/site-settings/adding-a-new-analytics-service.html
- https://analytics.google.com/analytics/web/
- https://marketingplatform.google.com/about/analytics/
- https://piwik.pro/
- https://developer.chrome.com/docs/lighthouse/overview/
- https://pagespeed.web.dev/
Email me at Neil@HarwaniSystems.in
Introduction to Search Engines – Part 1
Search engines have changed the way we work with the digital world completely. Digital world around us including the internet has evolved along with search engines almost simultaneously. Here is a primer on the working, technologies, statistics, history, tips for using, searching, etc. for Google.
How do they work?
Search engines work to search across billions of web pages, portals, documents, images, articles, news, journals, etc. to bring relevant and ranked results to your device. They do this by using few concepts like META Tags, Linking of web pages & content with each other, citations, source, web page credibility, social media relationships, configurations on websites like robots.txt / sitemap, etc.
Statistics
What you see as result on the first page of Google India is not the same in Google Europe for the same search word. Search results are customized and localized for each country, individual, session and even device at times. Currently as per publicly available statistics Google gets 40,000+ search requests per second which translates to few billion searches per day and would touch almost 1 Trillion searches approximately per year.
History of Google
Derived from word Googol and started at Stanford University. Initial algorithm was named BackRub.
Technology
Search engines have a spider / crawler which crawls across the internet to search and index / store the data in various databases. Ranking algorithm ranks all the content and refines it as per various parameters. Clustered servers across the world process the requests of search and provide content to devices. Lot of optimization based on new searches and corrections for old search terms / updating based on content changes happen regularly.
Tips & Tricks
Try: <vs.> <“EXACT SEARCH TERM”> <“SEARCH TERM -WITH SPECIFIC WORD EXCULED”> <“SITE: Search within a site”> <“DEFINE:”> <“SearchTerm1 * SearchTerm2 – Search everything including both terms and combinations with anything inbetween”>
Explore options of SETTINGS & TOOLS especially in IMAGE Search
Google Scholar
Search for scholarly papers, articles, theses, journals, books, reports, patents, etc.
Alternative search engines
Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yippy, Ask, DogPile, Yandex, etc.
If you want to learn more about the technologies used by search engines, try out:
In Part – 2 we will discuss advanced topics like AdWords, AdSense, Google Analytics, Google Search Console, new implications of rankings based on https / SSL, details of Nutch & Solr, algorithms for search, other search engines like Yahoo, Bing, etc.