Best practice for engines

Setting up an engine is a required step in configuring a functional search engine for your website.

Engines are at the heart of Cludo as it puts you in control of the search relevance. An engine is in charge of pulling the right content from your crawler(s) when a search query takes place. In relation to a crawler, the crawler’s job is to gather the different sources of content for a search, and then the engine’s job is to process it to provide relevant search results.

When should I create an engine?

An engine is configured to show specific content indexed by a crawler. To determine whether you need multiple engines, ask yourself the following questions:

• Do I have multiple languages on my site(s)?
• Do I need to show a specific set of pages/domains on a website’s search versus another website?
• Does the relevance differ from site to site?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, you probably want to create multiple engines.

For example, if you have multiple languages across your website(s), you will want to ensure that only the current language is searched. So, if your website exists in English and French, you’ll have one crawler and engine set for each of those.

You may have a subdomain or an area of the website where you only want a restricted set of content to be shown. For example, on your news page, you want a separate search that only presents the news articles. For this purpose, you could create an additional engine that is restricted to display this content. Your crawler may index your entire site, and in that case, you could add a filter on the engine to ensure that only the news articles would appear.

If you have a specific strategy for search on a site that differs from another, while they essentially present the same content, you can create a specific engine to configure the boosting value for each engine. For example, on a law firms website, you may want to create an engine that boosts the partners higher than press releases, but on the blog, you want to boost press releases and exclude partner pages.

If you need help or advice setting up engines, don’t hesitate to contact support.