Extending Search

Like most out-of-the-box Drupal features, search is designed to be extended. Several popular use cases can be addressed by contributed modules.

Facets

Facets (drupal.org/project/facets) is a project intended to offer site builders the ability to create additional search filters for end users who use search. Facets work well with Drupal’s structured content models. Consider a taxonomy field that categorizes nodes. Being able to filter by a term could be very useful beyond the out-of-the-box advanced search.

Facets go well beyond a term-based selection. Facets can natively change based on the type of field. This can be different form widgets or even different logic for searching fields. Ultimately, site builders can leverage this module to provide commonly used search interfaces tied to the underlying structured content.

Third-party indexes

Drupal offers out-of-the-box search capabilities, but other technologies might be better at allowing an application...