AEM Search Solution

@valcohen -- Yeah.. Search&Promote is definitely going through a few transition. There isn't a good web page for it other than the SnP documentation. My understanding is that instead of promoting SnP alone, they want to provide it as Adobe Target brand where that suite of product offers advanced targeting/personalization. When I asked the SnP product manager about the licensing, he said that I probably will need to buy it as an add-on to Adobe Target Standard and Premium. Definitely confusing and vague.

@PhilipBae heh, I was at Summit, and I had the opposite impression -- I was afraid Search&Promote was on its way out, since I didn't hear it mentioned once! I guess they're emphasizing the "Target" part of the name. So far we're using it to good effect -- I hope it works out for you.

@daniel_henrique

I had no idea AWS had CloudSearch. It looks pretty robust solution very comparable to Search&Promote. Will look into it. Thanks so much!

Philip

@valcohen -- I had no idea Search&Promote was a cloud-based search solution that Adobe offered. I just could not find anything about it from search on web. After attending one of the session at the Adobe Summit 2017, I now know! I ended up grabbing a bunch of screenshots.

Thanks!!
Philip

I agree! Thanks for the feedback!!

Philip

@PhilipBae, I'll second @karthickky2k4's recommendation to look at Adobe Search and Promote (SnP). We're using it on two sites. I'm not sure what you mean by "search has to go through Publisher", but in our case load on the Publish servers is low and controllable, because it's only hit when indexing content, not when conducting the search or presenting results.

We're using SnP to search our product catalog, not (yet) for full-text search of AEM pages. Catalog inventory can change throughout the day. An SnP crawler comes along every half hour and queries the JCR for nodes that have changed since the last crawl, and updates the SnP index. We also do a full re-index every night.

To search, we present a form to get the search terms, then issue an AJAX call from the page to SnP, which in our case returns JSON data that the front-end consumes and formats for presentation. So, our solution is heavy on the JavaScript side, but not on the Publish server.

SnP is not without problems (but what is?): documentation is very sparse, it's a cloud-hosted solution with limitations on testing environments, no ability to export settings from one environment and import into another, and some limitation on how you can search -- e.g. from what I understand, it's not possible to have multiple conditions on the same "column" like "SquareFootage > 1000 AND SquareFootage < 5000". We get around this by creating extra fields and mapping the same value to them: SquareFootage -> SFMin and SFMax , and the query becomes "SFMin > 10000 AND SFMax < 5000". In other instances we do only very simple filtering in the SnP query, and further filter the results on the page in JavaScript.

The benefits are that it doesn't impose a lot of load on the Publisher (again, depending on what you mean by "a lot of load"), and is supported by Adobe, which may outweigh the limitations.

Yes. I believe we are on the same page :-)

Here, for example, we've developed a custom solution using Amazon CloudSearch:

• some preprocessors index the page content (I think this could be done in a Replication Agent instead);
• the page templates and components include a custom client library;
• this client library makes AJAX calls to the CloudSearch endpoint;
• some portions of the page/component are re-rendered based on that results (we use an Angular-like framework to do it).

Regards,

Daniel.

Hi Daniel,

I think we are on the same page. That is exactly what I meant. My requirement is to stay off of Publish instance because it becomes a performance bottleneck and was hoping if anyone knew a good enterprise-level search engine that already has good integration built that we can purchase.

There are a few search solutions out there like: Apache Solr (free), Oracle Endeca, Microsoft FAST, Google Search Appliances, to name a few, but they do not have any prebuilt integration with AEM.

Lmk! Thanks so much!
Philip

Hi, didn't that product become Adobe Target? From what I know, Target does not serve up search results but targeting content doing A/B testing.

Lmk!
Philip