Search and metadata

As we add more content to our demo site, it might be useful for us to add a search function for our users. Drupal 8 has a built-in search that we can configure here.

Go to the Configuration page again and look at the contents of the SEARCH AND METADATA section.

Click on Search pages and you will see the configuration for the main search of the site.

We'll work our way through these settings now.

Indexing progress

In order to allow users to search for content, Drupal will index the content in its search database. When new content is added to the site, this is not indexed immediately but is instead queued to be processed later. This shows you how many items of content have been indexed and how many are waiting.

Note that if you choose to re-index the site then you will also need to run cron again manually to update the index.

Indexing throttle

Drupal will look at the contents of the indexing queue periodically in what's referred to as a Cron task, as discussed earlier in the chapter...