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If you have an extensive web application with a lot of content, it is vital to provide a search capability that helps users find relevant content.
Using Contentstack’s queries for small sites may work because it can perform a full-text search of fields, even though they do not support ranked results. But, for more significant websites—with hundreds or thousands of content pieces—it may not be a great idea, primarily because fetching results may take longer than usual, and the results will not be organized the way you want it to be.
Instead, Contentstack recommends integrating a dedicated search service into your application. Here’s why:
- Get highly relevant search results quickly: Most search services allow you to index content (including files), customize the results, manage ranking within results, and filter content by type. Hence, when users search for something, they get very relevant results in fractions of a second.
- Other powerful features: Apart from the ability to customize your search results, most search providers offer benefits such as auto-complete, dynamic facets, load-balanced querying, and federated search. These are beneficial features if your site search is likely to be used a lot.
- Scale as you go: Specialized search services can manage significant load, and the infrastructure needed to maintain the performance can auto-scale as you grow. Scaling, therefore, isn’t a headache.
- Get advanced analytics: To understand how your search performs and to improve the performance over time, search providers offer analytics that shows statistics on popular searches, queries with no results, popular results, click tracking, result rankings, and so on.
- Adopt microservices architecture: Contentstack focuses on being the best content-as-a-service, headless CMS provider. For other capabilities, such as search, it’s a good idea to use the best-of-breed services that perform much better than an all-in-one offering.
Let's now see how to integrate Contentstack with different search platforms.
Integrating Contentstack with Search Platforms
Contentstack integrates with search platforms seamlessly. Listed below are guides to some of the most popular search platforms that contain steps to integrate them with Contentstack.
