What are search categories?
The “Category” field is a standard field in the crawler, and can be set up to identify a specific type of content when crawling. This can be useful when implementing the template as it becomes very easy to implement a filter on said category.
Examples of category values
Blogs, News, Events, Webinars, Documentation, Product, Videos.
The example above is just one of multiple ways to categorize the content. Splitting the content by feature type, geographical relevance, or even target audiences, the category allows to split the content into high level types.
When setting up a template, implementing a category facet, will usually be the easier way of adding a filter to the result page.
Categories can also be used as part of performing the initial search, before showing any results, such as with the search wizard template.