Understanding the Sitecore Search Capabilities for XM Cloud Platform

Question

I am using https://doc.sitecore.com/search/en/developers/search-developer-guide/getting-started-with-sitecore-search.html link to learn about Sitecore search and have couple of questions related to Sitecore search for XM cloud platform

1. How is indexing different in Sitecore search than Solr indexing ?
2. Can we use computed index field in Sitecore Search like Solr, if yes, how? If no, do we have any other substitute for it? Please let me know if there are any other useful links and videos on Sitecore Search used for XM cloud platform.

Answer 1

Sitecore Search is a Saas product that is agnostic of the content sources. It provides you a few different ways to index content from content sources. You can create a web crawler that will crawl pages from a live site or you can have an API that will push the data for indexing.

1. With Solr indexing in XM/XP, you have the luxury of indexing the content directly from CMS to Solr. It gives you greater control over content and metadata of the content. However, with Sitecore Search crawler, you can only read the data that is in DOM. Or other option would be to call the API and send data from CMS to Search - a server to server integration which requires additional effort of transforming data etc.
2. Fields are called attributes in Search. You can create a computed attribute and fill its value during the data ingestion. If it's based on a web crawler, you will have the option to write javascript that can compute the value.

Answer 2

Sitecore Search is a SaaS product that is neither dependent on Sitecore, nor on Solr. So, you can use it for any given website.

When configured, Sitecore Search will crawl your website to build its own indexes. (These are not your Solr indexes) You can hit their REST APIs to get your search results. Ref: https://doc.sitecore.com/search/en/developers/search-developer-guide/using-sitecore-search-rest-apis.html

As far as you need Computed Index Fields, you will not have the same thing. But, there may be a similar feature you can configure either through the dashboard or the provided REST APIs.