KNOWLEDGE BASE

Examine

... is a provider based, config driven search and indexer framework. Examine provides all the methods required for indexing and searching any data source you want to use. It is agnostic of the indexer/ searcher API, as well as the data source. It's provider model driven so indexers and searchers for any type of data can be plugged in.

Umbraco Examine

... is a combination of Examine, Umbraco and Lucene.Net to make one powerful, flexible, extensible, and very fast search engine for Umbraco 4.x. Umbraco Examine is a Lucene.Net implementation of Examine using Umbraco as the data source. Umbraco Examine is very easy to setup and start working with and it's fully configurable by a .Net configuration section. Since each Umbraco installation is different, Umbraco Examine generally needs to be configured differently per instance.

Features

• Examine is a framework using a provider model, so the sky is the limit with regards to functionality if you need to build it.
• The base index providers in Examine have tons of handy events which gives you complete control over the entire indexing process without having to write your own provider. This makes it extremely easy to add custom data to indexes, intercept the data going into the index, and all sorts of other fun stuff.
• Out of the box, Examine has a fluent .Net querying language (it also obviously supports a simple free text string search too!) Example: 
  

  searchCriteria
  .Id(1080)     
  .Or()     
  .Field("headerText", "umb".Fuzzy())     
  .And()     
  .NodeTypeAlias("cws".MultipleCharacterWildcard())     
  .Not()     
  .NodeName("home");

• Umbraco Examine, has loads of features!
  • Hugely extensible through events
  • FAST.... VERY FAST!
  • Load balancing support
  • Multiple indexes. You can create as many different indexes as you want which is handy for things like multilingual websites, portal sites, etc...
  • Targetted indexing. You can specify via configuration as to what node types, properties, and node subsets (based on parent node) that you want included in your index.
  • If you're a Lucene fanatic, you can specify any type of Analzers you want to use for your indexing or searching via configuration.
  • Support for indexing any combination of: Published, Unpublished and Protected content via configuration.

 Umbraco Examine is bundled into the Umbraco 4.1 core and is now used as the internal back-office search engine. So what are you waiting for? Let the search begin!

Visit the links below for the binaries, source code and documentation.

• RC 2 Released @ CodePlex: http://examine.codeplex.com/releases/view/43765
  • The source also contains a test/demo project for a reference to configuration settings and how to use the codebase. You can download the source from the source control tab.
• Issue Tracker @ CodePlex: http://umbracoexamine.codeplex.com/WorkItem/List.aspx
• Discussions @ CodePlex: http://umbracoexamine.codeplex.com/Thread/List.aspx
• Documentation and downloads:
  • http://examine.codeplex.com/documentation