Read this blog on creating a custom search form Drupal 8 for more information.
Building a search page isn’t as straight forward as you’d think. At first, a client will want something which users can search for content, then they may want to modify the search results or even change the ranking of certain content. Long story short, something you thought would be as simple as enabling a module, ends up taking twice as long.
Drupal 8 core Search has been revamped and is much more powerful and accurate than in D7, but it still concentrates on the text in nodes and not other entities those nodes might contain—like Paragraphs, Views, or custom blocks. Core Search also does not allow you to choose which fields you want to index, how important those fields are, or use any preprocessors to tailor your search. Search API gives you all this and more.
However, if you wish to install a more powerful search engine on your website, then follow the steps below.
How to Create Custom Search Form Drupal 8
Here we will visit the steps required to add the ExpertRec Custom search engine to your website. This is one of the easiest setup processes of all the available options out there and is highly recommended.
- Navigate to https://cse.expertrec.com/newuser?platform=cse and signup with your Google ID.
- Enter your website’s URL when prompted. You can select a server location near you and add the URL of your sitemap if you wish to. These will be auto-detected otherwise.
- You can play around with the settings and customize the UI as the crawl runs. Once it is complete, you can check out a fully functional demo before taking the search to your website.
- You can take the search to your website with little to no effort. All you need to do is to paste the code snippet available on the dashboard on your website.
ExpertRec comes with more customization options that you can explore. You can read this article to find a more detailed guide on the installation and configuration.
