Previewing Your First Search in SearchStax

In this how-to, you’ll use Search Preview to confirm your data is indexed and searchable. You’ll open Preview, run a basic query, and check that the expected fields appear in results. This quick check tells you you’re ready to configure the search experience.

Prerequisites

Before you start, you’ll need:

Preview Your Search Results

After completing data ingestion:

  1. Click Preview in the top navigation bar.
    SearchStax Site Search Analytics Dashboard showing Conversions and Latency
  2. Perform a search using * to see all indexed content
  3. Confirm that your content appears in the results with the expected fields

You should see your CMS content displayed as unstyled search results, which confirms that data ingestion was successful.

SearchStax Site Search Preview screen showing initial state, facet filters, and sorting options.

If Smart Answers is available for your account and turned on for the selected profile, Search Preview can show a Smart Answer response with source links.

If Smart Answers isn't available for your account, Search Preview doesn't generate Smart Answer output.

When Smart Answers is available for your account and turned on for the selected profile, the Smart Answer response and links in Search Preview match the Hosted Search page.

Search Preview uses the published Smart Answers setting for the selected profile. If you turn Smart Answers off in draft only, Search Preview still generates the Smart Answer until that change is published.

If you don't see results, check that your content is published in your CMS and wait a few minutes for indexing to complete. You can reload the schema in Site Search to see results more quickly. If you still don’t see results, try manually triggering the indexing process from the Search API configuration in Drupal or rerun the indexing process in Sitecore.

What's Next

With your content now indexed in SearchStax, you're ready to configure how it appears in search results. Continue with configuring the search experience to set up result fields, facets, and search ranking.

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