The LucidWorks Enterprise search interface is modeled after the ones found in many popular web search engines available today and thus should be relatively familiar to most users. To that end, this search interface documentation will focus on a simple explanation of the various parts of the user interface along with brief explanations of what each part does.
Elements of the Search Interface
Below is a sample screenshot of the LucidWorks Enterprise Search User Interface.
Query box
The query box is where users start their searches. If using the default 'lucid' query parser, the allowed query syntax is described in detail in [LWE12UG:Lucid Query Parser].
Also note that links are available under the query box to allow users to save their searches as alerts or view previously saved alerts. Options for administering alerts is described in Enterprise Alerts.
Auto-Complete
If Auto-Complete is enabled, users will see a drop down list of possible search terms while entering their query.
 | Number of Auto-Complete Results At the current time, possible terms will be shown for the first term of a query only. |
Results
The search result area gives the user information about documents that match a query. Snippets are shown of the document that contains some of the words entered by the user; those words are also highlighted to show the query terms in context.
By default, links to documents on a filesystem is disabled (see Enabling Links to Documents in a Filesystem to allow these links to work). Additionally, results from a database will not be linked.
Sorting
LucidWorks Enterprise includes the ability to sort by Relevance, Date and Random. The default sort option is determined by the system administrator, but users can always choose to sort their results a different way by choosing one of the options on the screen.
Facets
Facets allow users to drill down into their query results based on common attributes such as subject or source.
Spell Checking
If spell checking is enabled, users will see suggestions for alternate query terms.
Enabling Links to Documents in a Filesystem
By default, linking to documents that have been crawled from a Filesystem has been disabled to keep the search interface out of the business of serving files. Serving arbitrary files from a privileged server process demands care. The end user may or may not have actual operating system level privileges to the files in question and LucidWorks Enterprise is configured by default to NOT serve files. If you wish to assume the risk of enabling this feature, you can enable file serving by following these steps.
1. Navigate to /rails/config/application.rb and find a section that looks like:
if Rails.env == "production" # Internalize LWE_SEARCH_ENABLED and LWE_SEARCH_ADDRESS, etc environment variables %w(admin alerts search).each {|plugin| LWEConfig[plugin.to_sym] = { :enabled => ENV["LWE_#{plugin.upcase}_ENABLED"] == "true" ? true : false, :address => ENV["LWE_#{plugin.upcase}_ADDRESS"] } } # core isn't a plugin, just need its address LWEConfig[:core] = {:address => ENV["LWE_CORE_ADDRESS"]} LWEConfig[:search][:serve_local_files] = false if LWEConfig[:search] LWEConfig[:admin].merge!({ :always_check_auth => true, # re-load authorizations on every request :secure_sessions => true, # encrypt sensitive info in session cookie })
2. Find the line that reads
LWEConfig[:search][:serve_local_files] = false if LWEConfig[:search]
and change false to true. Save the file.
3. Restart LucidWorks Enterprise. Document linking is now enabled.
 | Security Risks When LucidWorks Enterprise has been installed across 2 or more servers, there is a potential for a document to be presented to the user that was never indexed. Be sure this is unlikely to happen in your environment before enabling document linking. |