Federated Search
Federated search in Searchcraft enables a single query to search across multiple distinct indices and unify the results into one cohesive, ranked list. This is ideal for applications that organize their data into separate silos (e.g. products, articles, users), but want to offer a streamlined search experience.
In Searchcraft, federated search is accomplished via an entity called a federation. A federation relates two or more indices together and provides a mechanism for tuning behavior when those indices are queried together.
When using multiple content types you could have each source document conform to a single index and then filter based on facets. You could also accomplish this via a federated search if the source fields are too different from each other.
Example Use Cases
Section titled “Example Use Cases”-
Searching across indices where the documents fields in each index are different.
-
You are a magazine publisher and each magazine website has their own search index. You want to build a new website or application that can search across all magazine properties. Instead of managing an additional index that contains a copy of the same data you could create a federation to search across the data within all of the existing indices.
-
You have a SaaS application with mutiple tenants, each tenant in their own index and you want to be able to have an administrative view that searches across all tenants.
-
You are an education platform and want your instructor bios and course descriptions to be searchable together.
-
You are an e-commerce store and want your product catalog and blog posts to be searchable together.
Creating a Federation
Section titled “Creating a Federation”See the Federation Management reference for more information on creating a federation. For Searchcraft Cloud customers, federations are managed via the Vektron UI.