How to Leverage Your Solr Investment on Your Acquia Site

Get a modern search experience with powerful analytics and easy-to-use tools for your Acquia Site

This blog series from SearchStax explains how to combine their SearchStudio solution with Acquia Search to enable powerful search and unlock capabilities such as search insights, federated search, synonym management, promotion creation, related searches and more.

Digital marketing teams face a unique and challenging conundrum when it comes to search. While the importance of site search is globally accepted, accounting for an average of 45% of revenue, most marketers don’t know what is happening with search behind the scenes. They know that a single poor search experience means a lost opportunity (statistics show that 68% of searchers won’t return after a negative search experience), but they don’t have an easy way to improve the experience.

While the value of search in today’s digital world is undisputed, marketing teams are generally ill-equipped to properly harness the power of search. 

Solr is the Solution

Solr is a well-established and trusted search engine within the Drupal community, popular for its flexibility, robustness and open-source roots. 

Through its Acquia Search offering, Acquia has empowered site developers to harness the power of Solr when building Drupal sites: Acquia Search delivers between a 60% and 500% improvement in search response time. Acquia’s adoption of Solr has also helped increase community awareness for the search engine’s powerful benefits.

Acquia Search + SearchStudio

To take search to the next level, organizations can now integrate SearchStudio to their Acquia environment. Like Acquia Search, SearchStudio runs on Solr and delivers features that aren’t available in out-of-the-box Solr and have historically required extensive custom development. 

SearchStudio focuses on delivering two things that marketers need to effectively manage the search experience:

1. The ability to understand what’s happening with search (search insights).
2. The ability to quickly make changes accordingly (search optimization tools).

Since search is never “done”, successful organizations understand the need for constant feeding and caring of search. If marketers can understand search performance and configure the search experience without requiring developer involvement, everybody wins. 

By leveraging the SearchStax Drupal module (created by Solr search expert Thomas Seidl), developers can quickly implement site search with UI Accelerators. Digital marketing teams are empowered to access search insights in a no-code environment. Teams can leverage these insights to implement search changes (faceting, synonyms, promotions, etc.) - with easy-to-use tools all within the same dashboard and interface.

By unlocking search insights and providing digestible performance metrics, the first piece of the search challenge is solved (knowledge is power!).

Basic search relevance can be easily configured to improve the search experience. The module lets non-technical users manage stopwords, synonyms, and spell check with an easy-to-use interface. 

Marketing teams can also provide personalized search experiences based on the persona of the user visiting the site. The no-code toolset allows organizations to customize the search experience and results with global filters, ranking to boost specific fields, and rules and promotions to shape the search experience. 

Lastly, the SearchStudio module empowers teams to help users discover the right content at the right time with powerful recommendation tools like Auto-Suggest and Related Searches.

Try SearchStudio or Get a 15-Minute Demo

SearchStax provides a free, 14-day trial of SearchStudio. Our developer documentation for the Drupal Module will help you get up and running in under an hour. If you’re not ready for a free trial, you can schedule a 15-minute demo with one of our search experts to get a quick analysis of search on your current website and see SearchStudio in action.

Acquia + SearchStax

Check out our Acquia + SearchStudio overview and learn more about our partnership with Acquia.