Updated: 7 April 2026 for Release v228
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.
Take note!
- Production results only show future productions (Release 228)
- Past Productions will follow shortly (expected in Release 230)
If you do want past productions to be included in search results, let us know and we can revert you back to classic search while we are working on bringing the feature to the new search engine.
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)
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
- Search results are ordered by relevance. The smart ElasticSearch algorithms prioritise titles that match the search term, and looks at how often the term is referenced in any given item.
About ElasticSearch
- Supports results for synonyms
- Supports simple misspellings of common words (artist names coming soon)
- Orders search results based on relevance
- Is highly customisable. It will keep on being optimised for searching content specific to Arts & Culture
Indexed fields per item
Item type | Indexed fields |
Pages & Stories | meta title, meta description, parts, alternative search terms |
People | title, first name, surname, group name, transliteration |
Productions, movies, courses, exhibitions | title, subtitle, meta description, teaser, description part 1, description part 2, alternative search terms |
News | title, teaser, description |
Alternative Search Terms
Alternative Search Terms can be added to Productions and Pages/Stories. This is ideal if you want to control your search results based on search terms you expect your visitors to use, but aren’t present in the visible page texts i.e. common misspellings of names, places, or show titles, so the page is still found even when the search term was misspelled.
Content in this field will not show anywhere on your website, and is used in your site search.
How do I use it?
- Navigate to any Production, Page or Story in your Dashboard
- In the Alternative Search Terms field add search terms that visitors might use but don't appear in your visible content.
- Include common misspellings of names, places, or show titles.
- Use Google Analytics site search data to identify popular search terms and add them to relevant content.
Search Results (Integrated sites)
For integrated websites, search results show links to login and account pages. Since account pages are not accessible to search, this added service makes it easier for Visitors to find them.
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