About Augmented Search

November 14, 2023

Augmented Search provides your website visitors with a modern search experience. Visitors will benefit from instant search, facets (term, range), filters, fuzzy search, sorting, and most importantly, greater search relevance.

Based on Elasticsearch, augmented search can easily scale when your website traffic reaches its peaks. Augmented search can be content and page-based depending on your needs, and is fully compatible with Jahia advanced features such as preview, publication, permissions, visibility rules, and more.

Augmented Search is only available for production on Jahia Cloud. However, it can be used locally for development purposes. Contact your Customer Success Manager for more information.

Want to quickly see Augmented Search in action? Simply use the search on this site, and use the facets to narrow the results to what you are looking for!

What are the differences between Augmented Search and the embedded Jahia search?

The main difference is that Augmented Search is a page-based search, where the embedded Jahia search is content-based. In other words, searching for two terms used in different content items inside a same page will return results with Augmented Search, where no results will be returned with the embedded Jahia search.

Augmented Search also offers the possibility to use facets for search results, a capability not available with the embedded Jahia search.

These new capabilities are made possible by relying on Elasticsearch for the indexation and a GraphQL API to run the queries. We do provide a couple components which can be added to a site to quickly activate Augmented Search on your site.

Deporting the search on Elasticsearch also reduces the load on the Jahia servers, improving the overall stability of the environment.

What does it mean to replace the Jahia search with Augmented Search?

You need to be a Jahia Cloud customer, as Augmented Search is only available on Jahia Cloud. That being said, it can be used locally for developed purposes.

Implementing a project to use Augmented Search requires to:

  • Understand how the Augmented Search GraphQL API works
    • In order to build the search queries that will match your functional needs, if you want to use facets for instance
  • Develop the UI components for your search feature
    • We do provide a set of out-of-the-box react components, however to make the best of Augmented Search you will need to develop your own UI components, in the technology of your choice, to interact with the GraphQL API
  • Fine tune the indexation configuration
    • You may have to fine tune the indexation configuration, in order to implement facets, or to improve the relevance of the search terms
Note that Augmented Search and the embedded Jahia search are not exclusive, on the same server, you can have one site using Augmented Search, and another site using the embedded Jahia search.