Searching

The LucidWorks Enterprise search interface is modeled after those found in many popular web search engines available today and its features should be familiar to most users. This section 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 you are using the default 'lucid' query parser, you can see a detailed description of the allowed query syntax in the Lucid Query Parser topic.

Also note that links are available under the query box to allow users to save their searches as alerts or view previously saved alerts. Details of the Alerts user interface and options for administering them is described in Enterprise Alerts.

Auto-Complete

If you enabled Auto-Complete, users see a drop down list of possible search terms while entering their query.

Number of Auto-Complete Results Currently, LucidWorks Enterprise only displays single term suggestions, based on the first letters entered for a query.

Results

The search results 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 are enabled (see Enabling Links to Documents in a Filesystem to turn this off). Results from a database will not be linked. Results from an archive (i.e., .zip, .tgz, or .gz files) will be shown on an intermediary screen to show the nesting of the files (particularly when there is an archive within an archive).

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 are groupings of results based on common attributes such as source or category and offer users an alternative way to drill down into their query results.

Spell Checking

If spell checking is enabled, users will see suggestions for alternate query terms.

Disabling Links to Documents in a Filesystem

By default, linking to documents that have been crawled from a Filesystem has been enabled to simplify the user experience out of the box. However, serving arbitrary files from a privileged server process demands caution. This is because LucidWorks Enterprise does not merely provide a link to the document on a remote file server but serves the document stream, which may allow a user to access documents they should not view. If you do not wish to assume the risk of leaving this feature enabled, you can disable file serving by following these steps to modify the "serve_local_files" setting in application.rb.

1. In Windows, you may need to stop LucidWorks Enterprise before editing this setting. Navigate to /rails/config/application.rb and find a section that looks like (near the top):
   
   

   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] = true 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] = true if LWEConfig[:search]
   

   
   and change true to false. Save the file.
   
   

3. Restart LucidWorks Enterprise. Document linking is now disabled.
   
   

   Security Risks When LucidWorks Enterprise has been installed across two or more servers, documents that have never been indexed could potentially be presented to users. Take precautions to prevent this behavior in your environment before going to production with document linking enabled.