Introduction
A SearchStax Site Search solution Search App can be tailored to the viewer’s preferred language.
Add-On Feature
This is an optional feature that can be added to your SearchStax account. Contact support for details.
These Search Experiences offer the language-specific benefits of analytics, synonyms, stopwords, ranking, result and display fields, promotions–and many other features–that should differ from the default English search experience.
The Search App can serve queries and record user events for multiple languages simultaneously. See Understanding Apps, Languages, and Search Profiles to learn how Apps, Languages, and Search Profiles work together.
Available Languages
Managed Search Languages vs. Site Search Languages
The list of Solr languages supported by Managed Search is not quite the same as the Site Search list below. See Solr Language Support for more information.
Note: If you need to configure Site Search for a Drupal language that isn't available in the UI language selector (such as Serbian or Macedonian), see Configure Drupal Languages Beyond System Languages in Site Search.
Site Search language-specific experiences can be configured for:
| Language | Drupal* | Sitecore | Custom |
| Arabic (ar) | ✔ | Sitecore 10.0+ | ✔ |
| Bulgarian (bg) | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Catalan (ca) | ✔ | Sitecore 10.0+ | ✔ |
| Simplified Chinese (zh_cn) | ✔ | Sitecore 10.0+ | ✔ |
| Traditional Chinese (zh) | ✔ | Sitecore 10.0+ | ✔ |
| Croatian (hr) | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Czech (cs) | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Danish (da) | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Dutch (nl) | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| English (en) | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| English – Canada (en_ca) | ✔ | Sitecore 10.0+ | ✔ |
| English – Hong Kong (en_hk) | ✔ | Sitecore 10.0+ | ✔ |
| English – United Kingdom (en_gb) | ✔ | Sitecore 10.0+ | ✔ |
| Estonian (et) | ✔ | Sitecore 10.0+ | ✔ |
| Finnish (fi) | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| French (fr) | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| French – Canada (fr_ca) | ✔ | Sitecore 10.0+ | ✔ |
| German (de) | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Greek (el) | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Hindi (hi) | ✔ | Sitecore 10.0+ | ✔ |
| Hungarian (hu) | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Indonesian (id) | ✔ | Sitecore 10.0+ | ✔ |
| Irish (ga) | ✔ | Sitecore 10.0+ | ✔ |
| Italian (it) | ✔ | Sitecore 10.0+ | ✔ |
| Japanese (ja) | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Korean (ko) | ✔ | Sitecore 10.0+ | ✔ |
| Latvian (lv) | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Norwegian (no) | ✔ | Sitecore 10.0+ | ✔ |
| Persian (fa) | ✔ | Sitecore 10.0+ | ✔ |
| Polish (pl) | ✔ | Sitecore 9.3+ | ✔ |
| Portuguese (pt) | ✔ (pt_pt) | ✔ | ✔ |
| Portuguese – Brazil (pt_br) | ✔ | ||
| Romanian (ro) | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Russian (ru) | ✔ | Sitecore 10.0+ | ✔ |
| Serbian (sr) | ✔ | ||
| Slovak (sk) | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Spanish (es) | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Spanish – Latin America (es_419) | ✔ | Sitecore 10.0+ | ✔ |
| Swahili (sw) | Sitecore 10.0+ | ✔ | |
| Swedish (sv) | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Thai (th) | ✔ | Sitecore 10.0+ | ✔ |
| Turkish (tr) | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Ukrainian (uk) | ✔ | Sitecore 10.0+ | ✔ |
| Vietnamese (vi) | ✔ | Sitecore 10.0+ | ✔ |
* Solr 8.0 and above
The default language experience of all Search Apps is English (en).
Components of a Specific-Language Experience
When a Search App has multiple languages, each one includes a complete Search Experience profile. That is, each of the enabled languages has its own:
- Analytics: The Search App maintains separate databases of user behavior for each of the enabled language experiences. The Dashboard, Searches, Items, Power Search, and Search Feedback tables all summarize user behavior for one language only.
- Search: For each language, the Search App maintains a completely separate set of Results Fields and Search Profiles. The Search Preview and Hosted Search App draw from this language-specific profile of features.
- Recommendations: Auto-Suggest and Related Searches can be enabled for all available languages.
Adding Language-Specific Experiences
To add a language, go to Site Search > App Settings > Languages.
Click the Add Language button. Use the filter to show All, Custom, or System languages, select an available language, and click the next Add Language button.
Be sure to Save the changes. It can take half a minute for the Search App to build the infrastructure to support the new language experience.
Once a language is added, you should configure the App for the language – at a minimum the Results Configuration. When you add a new language to your Search App, selected Search Fields and Results Fields are published right away.
If the language you need isn't available as a system language, create a custom language first. Custom languages are created at the account level, then added to compatible Site Search apps. See Create and Manage Custom Languages in Site Search.
Managing Fields for Custom Apps
To support multiple languages on a Custom App, you will need to make sure your fields are formatted compatible with Site Search. This involves customizing your schema to include fields of the proper type. These fields can then be used to store and index data in different languages and types as per your app’s specific requirements.
The dynamic fields for supported languages are already present in your schema as follows:
<dynamicField name="*_txt_es" type="text_es" indexed="true" stored="true"></dynamicField>The snippet above is for the Spanish language, but the same format applies to all available language types.
For all fields you intend to analyze for stemming, stopwords, synonyms, etc, use the format above. These are fields you typically use as display and search fields.
If you don’t need to analyze the field, e.g., faceting, or exact match, you can use the string type _es_s.
Delete a Language from the Search App
It is also possible to delete a language from a Search App. Select the checkbox beside the language and then click the trashcan icon.
Removing a language from a Search App permanently deletes all of the language-specific Search Experience settings and the Analytics data collected through that Search Experience. You can re-add the language later, but the previous work cannot be recovered.
Setting the “Default” Language
The Languages table and the Add Language window mention a “default” language. If the Search App receives a query with no language parameter specified, Site Search uses the default language-specific Search Experience.
To change the default language, select a radio button on the Language Management page, then click Save.
There is also a checkbox in the Add Language window that has the same effect. After adding the language to the Search App, click Save.
Building a Language-Specific Experience
When you open a Search App for editing in Site Search, you must select which language-specific Search Experience to work on. You can edit only one language experience at a time. (You can switch from one language to another as long as you remember to save your changes.)
Pull down the language droplist in the Profile Selector and choose the desired language:
From that point on, building the Search Experience is the same for all language selections. Field boosting, for instance, works the same way for English, French, and Spanish experiences. Again, be sure to save your changes.
Language-Specific Searching
Now that you’ve built a language-specific Search Experience, how can you present it to your users?
Go to Site Search > Configurations > Search UI > Hosted Search Experience. This page displays the URL of the Hosted Search Experience that serves the selected language.
In the image above, we selected “ES” (Spanish) as the selected language. Site Search then displayed the URL of the Spanish Hosted Search App. When your search users follow that URL, they will see the Spanish Search Experience.
You can see the search calls being made from the Hosted experience to see how the language parameters are being passed. Most API take in
language=
where code is the code in brackets in the Languages table in this document
Select a different language from the Language droplist and the URL will change to match that language.