Engines

What is an Engine?

The engine is at the heart of the search setup. When implementing search on the website, an engine is needed to define which results to present. An engine can be connected to the search index of one or multiple crawlers, for added flexibility.

A lot of features are enabled and configured on an engine-bases. Because of these features, two engines with a big overlap in content can still end up working in very different ways due to the way in which tools have been applied. When looking at analytics and reports, the data here also appears on a per-engine basis in order to provide a more detailed view of the visitor activity.

How to set up an Engine

An engine is required for any search implementation and connects with one or more crawlers.

1. In the navigation, select Configuration › Engines
2. Click the New button at the top of the table
3. Give the engine a name in the Name field
4. Select a crawler from the Add a crawler drop-down to use for the engine
5. Click the + Icon to add the crawler
6. Optional: repeat the previous two steps to add more than one crawler to the engine
7. Optional: toggle highlight search text in the web pages to enable the Web Content Highlighter feature
8. Optional: Under Pre-filter search results, add a filter to limit which results are shown when using the engine
   • Click the Add New Filter button
   • Select a field from the drop-down
   • Type a value in the input field. This value must be exactly what has been indexed for the chosen field and is case-sensitive
   • Click the + icon
   • Optional: Repeat the previous four steps to add more than one filter
   • Your engine will now only display results that match the added filter(s)
9. Click the Save Engine button

How to delete an Engine

For security reasons, engines can only be deleted by Cludo staff.

If you need to delete an engine, please contact support and let us know the ID(s) of the engine(s) you would like to delete.

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.