Category Archives: Search

Liferay, Search

How to tame the SEO beast with Liferay? Part 1.

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Here are some keywords and concepts to explore:

1. Performance tuning – https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/performance-tuning-liferay-part-3-neil-harwani-nsoof/

2. Performance options for pages & search in built in Liferay – -> https://learn.liferay.com/w/dxp/using-search/search-pages-and-widgets/search-insights

–> https://learn.liferay.com/w/dxp/content-authoring-and-management/page-performance-and-accessibility/analyze-seo-and-accessibility-on-pages

–> https://learn.liferay.com/w/dxp/content-authoring-and-management/page-performance-and-accessibility/about-the-page-audit-tool

3. SEO features in Liferay

–> https://learn.liferay.com/w/dxp/site-building/optimizing-sites

–> https://learn.liferay.com/w/dxp/site-building/displaying-content/using-display-page-templates/configuring-seo-and-open-graph

4. Set up your own monitoring (simple JMeter is a good start) and focus on page load times in conjunction with other things rather than only scores. Use various tools – an example: –> https://bloggerspassion.com/website-performance-speed-test-tools/

–> https://developer.chrome.com/docs/lighthouse/overview/

5. Liferay headless – https://www.liferay.com/solutions/headless-apis

6. Lazy loading, innovative solutions like lighter pages with type ahead and so on

7. Understand various tools for website performance, formula for page speed insights & SEO but focus on your metrics like page load speed, image quality. Don’t blindly pick a tool and follow it. However, suggestions / recommendations / insights of various tools should be explored and worked upon as needed

8. Note: Mobile score is throttled down by page speed insights to slow 3G or so

Other hints:

1. Robots.txt

2. Core web vitals

3. Sitemap

4. https

5. Broken links, friendly URLs, mobile friendliness

6. Content quality

7. Tags

8. Images

9. Caching

Liferay with right configuration, customization & tuning is capable of some magical things 🙂

Elasticsearch, Search

Search related techno-functional tips – Part 1

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  • 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
Liferay, Search

Elasticsearch with Liferay – Notes & Links – Part 1

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Below are the important notes & links for configuring Liferay DXP with Elasticsearch.

Email me: Neil@HarwaniSystems.in

Liferay, Search

Notes on Liferay search optimization – Part 1

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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

Search

Introduction to Search Engines – Part 1

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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:

Apache Solr

Apache Nutch

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.