Using App Search on a website interface

Elastic Enterprise Search App Search
#1

Hi there, firstly, thank you for your patience with what I'm about to ask!

I've setup an engine/index on App Search, all is okay there, I now want to implement a search into my website, with either PHP or Javascript (preferred).

I've looked at step 4 here:

But I am quite a traditional developer, the NPM stuff is above me, I've tried creating the build directory but I just can't see what I'm supposed to use, it also appears to me that a lot is based around react, is this a requirement?

I've Google'd about and YouTube but struggling to find a way to easily implement the API with a HTML form on an existing PHP website.

Does this make sense? Gosh I feel so out of my depth! If there is any resources that might help me out here you could push me on to the right tracks that would be much appreciated, or perhaps I've just confused myself all with it!

I'm coming from Algolia where I used instantsearch.js and this was simply using a JS CDN for the search and a bit of HTML.

Thank you.

#2

Hi!

Welcome to the community!

For App Search the main way to add UI to your website is Search UI. But it requires a knowledge of NPM and React.

It sounds like in your case, Site Search would be a better choice. It is very easy to set up and has a simple JavaScript embed that adds search to a website. Here's a quick start guide: Site Search Quick Start | Swiftype Documentation

Let me know how it goes and feel free to ask questions if you get stuck.

#3

Thank you Vadim for the clarification. That's very helpful, it's a shame that React/NPM is required for implementation into a simple HTML website form (for me anyway, because those are 2 things I'm not good at! :joy:)

My concern with Site Search is that this uses a crawler rather than us populating it with data, is that right? We ideally would need to provide the data as things like stock, price and other product information must be accurate and current.

#4

I know what you mean :slight_smile:

In that case, I think Site Search API-based engines could suit your need: API Quick Start | Swiftype Documentation

Is that what you are looking for?