Selecting a Search Engine for on-site Search — Open Source vs Search as a Service

On-site search (also known as site search or internal search) allows users to identify the required data from a website by typing queries into a search bar.

The website search helps the visitors to quickly navigate and identify the required content within the website, the website search reduces bounce rate, boosts conversions also helps us to identify what visitors are more interested/looking for in our website. The website search is now an essential part of website design, when your website search doesn’t function as expected it will impact the website visitors(potentially lose the customers).

Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash

The important factor is to identify the best search engine/platform that helps you to enable the required website search functionalities. The search platform should be identified not only considering the current business requirements but the future needs — in some cases machine learning capabilities might not be a requirement today but it will become the mandatory requirement in the future.

There are two major categories of search engines:

• Build an internal search engine from scratch
• Open Source
• Search as a Service

Open source search is implemented through free, open-source software that is built to handle many different use cases. Typically, the software is governed by the Apache or MIT License, which effectively allows for any commercial or personal use. The internal team should take care of the hosting, operations, maintenance(external hosting options are possible)

In Search as a Service, search functionality, hosting, operations, maintenance, and more are provided by the software provider.

Features:

Some of the important features to be considered while selecting the search platforms:

• Auto-Complete
• Multi-language support
• Boost or Bury content — the search admins should be able to boost or burry the content quickly based on the need through simplified UI
• Search Performance — the search result should be displayed based on the business requirement e.g <2s