About .NET Search Hubs and Search Interfaces
Search hubs
A search hub is simply a container of one or more search interfaces. Your Coveo administrator assigns a search hub to each Coveo access point. Therefore, you transparently access search hubs on your computer or on your mobile device through one of the Coveo access points made available to you.
Examples of Coveo access points are (see Coveo Access Points):
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Default Coveo Web search page
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Desktop Searchbar (see Desktop Searchbar)
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Outlook Sidebar (see Outlook Sidebar)
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Coveo search boxes integrated in the Intranet or in repositories like SharePoint or Sitecore
Behind the scene, the search hubs and the search interfaces connect with the Coveo unified index (see Understanding Coveo .NET Components Hierarchy).
Search interfaces
A search interface is a user interface from which you perform queries and review, refine, and open search results. As shown in the following figure, you can picture a Coveo search interface as being divided in three zones.
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Search context (see Around the Search Box in a .NET Search Interface) |
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Search results (see Search Results) |
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Faceted navigation (see About Facets) |
The Coveo Platform comes with a number of standard search interfaces that your Coveo administrator can make available to you when they are applicable to your environment. Each search interface has its specific scope, search results configuration, and its set of optimized facets to help you easily find appropriate information.
Example: The scope of the My Emails search interface could be the Microsoft Exchange and Symantec Enterprise Vault servers in your organization to allow you to easily search your current and archived emails, contacts, and calendar events.
Your Coveo administrator can customize standard search interfaces and create new ones using the Interface Editor. The following table lists examples of standard Coveo search interfaces.
| Search interface | Purpose |
|---|---|
| My Emails
Shared Emails |
To search through messages located in your Outlook mailboxes and in archive files
(.pst).
Also, since email messages can often be associated with contacts, the results may also include pertaining contact information retrieved from several lists (Outlook contacts, SharePoint, Active Directory, or Salesforce). |
| Intranet | To search through documents, contacts, and items retrieved from an Intranet like SharePoint.
You can view files and other items such as posted news or personal sites that correspond to your search criteria. |
| File Shares | To search through documents located in shared folders or drives (typically on a network). |
| Images | To search through images available from all indexed sources. |
| People | To search through contact information retrieved from several lists (Outlook contacts, SharePoint, Active Directory, or Salesforce). |
| CRM | To retrieve information from your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) application like Salesforce. |
| All Content | To search through the whole Coveo unified index for content from all repositories. |