Do we have predictive search capability within Sitecore?

Question

I'm looking for predictive search for content page in Sitecore.

Something similar, what google search provide. Do we have anything like this?

Answer 1

So this depends on what you mean by predictive search.

If you mean a simple autocomplete, then yes. Sitecore provide an n-gram analyzer for both Lucene and Solr. To use this, add a new field to the index and map the field to use the n-gram analyzer instead of the default. You will need a custom computed field and an update to the schema.xml - see this post for more detail: http://www.ehabelgindy.com/sitecore-7-solr-search-auto-complete-using-ngram/

If you mean a full predictive and smart search "like" Google, then not out of the box with Sitecore. There are a few options to be able to do this tho.

Coveo

The most straightforward would be to use Coveo for Sitecore. Coveo offers a few cool features that you can plug into Sitecore, predictive search/auto complete looks to be included in that.

Custom Implementation

You can roll your own implementation of this using either the Lucene or Solr indexes. I would suggest that you use Solr for this as it has some nice features in the API that you would have to implement yourself with Lucene.

Doing a custom implementation is pretty complex tho, you would need a custom index, custom crawler to make sure that the correct page content was included etc...

Although I'd like to put the whole answer here, its would be a bit long, so here are some links to instructions:

http://www.cominvent.com/2012/01/25/super-flexible-autocomplete-with-solr/

If you can be more specific with the requirements, we can tailor the answer to your needs.