IOP Uses SearchStax Managed Search on
on their New Drupal Website

The IOP has just delivered phase one of a new digital platform that aims to offer a high-quality, seamless user experience to a wide range of audiences – from the physics curious to those at the cutting-edge of the discipline.  This new platform has focused on using technology that can enable information to be drawn together to meet those different user needs.

The IOP therefore required a robust, comprehensive and extensive multi-site search facility to deliver large amounts of indexable pages from several disparate content sites. The previous website was hosted on AWS and they realized that Drupal native search would not be able to meet their advanced feature requirements. In response, the IOP team initiated a project to identify and implement a new performant search infrastructure that could grow with them.

IOP requires a robust, comprehensive and extensive multi-site search facility for their Drupal 8 website. Their previous website was hosted on AWS and Drupal native search would not be able to meet their advanced feature requirements. The two key must-have requirements were faceted search and compliance with WCAG 2.0 accessibility requirements. Other should-have features include the ability of search to return all pages including those behind a login, weighting of some results so they return higher, “did you mean” search suggestions, indexing different types of content including PDFs, search synonyms and spell check.

After looking at different search options including Drupal native search, IOP recognized that only Apache Solr and ElasticSearch would meet the advanced features with functionality that is available out-of-the box. In the end, IOP selected Solr as the search facility because it is more mature in the Drupal space, is relatively easy to implement compared to ElasticSearch and has a large and active open source community.