The search landscape in Sitecore has shifted.
Today at the Sitecore Symposium 2014 Coveo announced a free version of their Coveo for Sitecore search offering, Coveo for Sitecore - Free Edition.
Coveo is a leader in the search-space. In fact, Gartner named Coveo the visionary leader in Enterprise Search in their July 2014 Magic Quadrant. With this in mind, the sophistication and quality of technology they are providing for free to Sitecore customers is remarkable.
Lou Tetu, Coveo CEO, announcing Coveo for Sitecore - Free Edition at Sitecore Symposium 2014
As we've worked with various free search offerings for Sitecore, I'd like to highlight a few advantages of using Coveo for Sitecore for search.
JavaScript UI
Coveo ships with a fully-functional search interface. Paging, faceting, sorting, auto-correct and many other features work out of the box. Between development and testing, these features out of the box saves weeks to months off an implementation.
REST API
Coveo for Sitecore allows to you to get creative and access search on your own terms using the JSON-based REST API.
Managed Inside The Content Editor
You can use the Sitecore Content Editor to customize aspects of your search like infinite scroll, paging, filtering & sorting without touching code, really.
.NET Technology
Coveo is a Microsoft .NET-based product. It allows you to keep your technology stack 100% .NET for search. Other alternatives such as Solr is Java-based.
Contextualization
Coveo's Query Ranking Expression technology allows you to boost the relevance of content in real-time. This allows your search to adapt to your users.
Leading Search Engine
Outside the context of Sitecore, Coveo has supplanted leaders like Google in terms of their search vision. This clear separates it from other free-competitors like Lucene & Solr.
A paid support model is also available for the free version of Coveo for Sitecore. They're releasing official details on this later today.
Of course, there is still a full-featured enterprise edition of Coveo for Sitecore that integrates with Sitecore's Experience Engine to dynamically contextualize searches in addition to content.
For more information I'd recommend reading Coveo's official press release.
Very exciting news. As Fishtank is a partner with Coveo, I'd be happy to answer any questions on Twitter @dancruickshank or in the comments below.
