Updated: 31 August 2026 for Release v235

When a visitor searches for something through the search bar on your website, your new search engine serves relevant results quickly without decreasing the performance of your website.

Introducing the New Search

In release 228 we introduce a smarter search engine that won't let your website buckle under pressure.

Features

• Your brand new search engine runs on its own dedicated server, completely separate from your main site
• Heavy search queries no longer slow your website down, especially during busy on-sales
• Indexed results load faster and deliver cleaner, more meaningful matches
• Eliminates false positives where a short search term accidentally matched part of a longer, unrelated word
• Fuzzy search feature finds matches when the spelling is slightly off, incomplete, or contains typos
• The new search will also look at these content fields:
  • Description part 2 (Productions)
  • Meta title (Pages/Stories)
  • Meta description (Pages/Stories, Productions)

Illustration of the previous search infrastructure and the new.

How the search works (technical overview)

• The new search engine uses ElasticSearch, a distributed, open-source search and analytics engine, designed for fast, real-time retrieval of data.
• All your relevant website data is synced to a special indexing server, detached from your main website database.
• The indexing server creates a catalog of files, metadata, and content, enabling near-instant search results.
• Every time you save a change in your CultureSuite CMS, the indexing server is updated with those changes in real time.
• Search results are grouped by item type, starting with Productions, Themes, then People and Pages/Stories