Sitecore 7 Faceted search (front-end), no SOLR

Question

I am not able to find any information, if faceted search works in Sitecore 7 no only for internal search, but also for the front-end side.

Can a business user specify facets, that can be used by a site visitor on the front-end, using JUST the Sitecore built-in search and not using the SOLR engine?

Answer 1

Did you looked at developers guide to item buckets and search? You can create facets that can be used for internal search and for front-end search also.

5.6.9 Creating a New Search Facet

You can use facets to drill down to more specific results in any list of search results. The default facets are displayed in the facets menu on the right side of the search results. To create a custom facet, navigate to the /sitecore/system/Settings/Buckets/Facets item of the content tree. Right click on the Facets item and in the context menu, click Insert, Facet. You now have to specify the name of the field in your index, in the parameters field in the content tab. You can apply hierarchical faceting by listing many fields separated by commas. This is useful if you want to facet on, for example, Clothes Type first, and then on Color...

You can filter by facets in linq, eg:

var results = queryable.FacetOn(d => d.Name); 
var facets = results.GetFacets(); 
foreach (var category in facets.Categories) 
{ 
    Console.WriteLine(category .Name); 
    foreach (var facetValue in category.Values) 
    { 
         Console.WriteLine("{0}: {1}", facetValue.Name, facetValue.Aggregate); 
    } 
}

Also look at this Sitecore-7 Partner webinair

You can also use tags for search.

Answer 2

Yes, facets is supported in both the Lucene and Solr search provider.

For enabling business users to specify facets that can be used by visitors take a look at the Autohaus demo site to see how it could be implemented.