Your ASP.NET Web Forms & MVC search engine

Powerful search for web applications

SearchUnit is a search engine component library for MVC & Web Form applications.

Try SearchUnit now:

Unlimited Searching

No restrictions on; number of searches, index size, document limit or file types you can index. A truly fully featured, full text search experience for your site.

Best UX available

Our latest AJAX based end user interface is smooth and quick, exactly what users will expect.

Craft a custom experience

Build the best internal search for your app. by using our open API and Plug-in architecture to make your internal search engine work your way.

Use Faceted Search to organize your app.

Categorization and multiple filter types will clarify your content to users, resulting in improved find rates, better understanding of your data and smiles all round.

More details...

Faceted search filtering

Get the broadest client platform support possible

Our Javascript based usage and web services (WCF or ASMX) architecture mean that client platforms and frameworks such as MVC, Web Forms, ASP.NET AJAX, HTML, ASP, jQuery, AngularJS, Azure etc are all supported. Server-side web services mean mobile platforms such as Android, iOS can search too.

Keep the index up to date and ticking with automated refreshes

Windows Services, or the Task Scheduler can be used to periodically reindex content, and use our API to incrementally index content immediately.

Compare SearchUnit with open source engines

View our SearchUnit comparison

Make the design team happy

SearchUnit's templates accommodate leading edge CSS / HTML based responsive designs.

Secure document and page access to specific user groups

Setup ACLs (called Security Groups) to stop users even seeing results they are not entitled to open.

Give end users the features they want

Filters
Sorting
Auto-complete
Result Previews
Spelling
Geospatial Search
SearchUnit - Features

Intranet search too

Filesystem and spider based document importing, doesn't matter where it lives, SearchUnit can index it.

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Tools for web and desktop management

Our refined desktop based Index Management Tool and Web Administration app. let you easily monitor and manage indexes.

Minimal application footprint

By adding some <script src...> tags you automatically configure the search engine for your page.

Index almost any file type

Built in support for the most common files eg.
  • .aspx
  • .asp
  • .csv
  • .doc
  • .docx
  • .htm
  • .html
  • .jsp
  • .msg
  • .ods
  • .odt
  • .pdf
  • .ppt
  • .pptx
  • .rtf
  • .txt
  • .xls
  • .xlsx
  • .xml
  • .zip

and if we don't support it out of the box you can use custom / 3rd party file parsers to get the job done.

Minimal fuss internationalization

I18N by design, not afterthought. SearchUnit automatically supports most languages and scripts (Western languages, Middle Eastern, and partial support for Eastern languages) with additional enhancements for 15 languages (spelling, stemming and stoplists).

A Search Engine on your website in no time at all

Add
our scripts and tags to your page.
Set
which directory will be used to store index files.
Index
documents using our Index Management tool.

View the full Quick Start Guide

SearchUnit Features

  • Unlimited index size

    We do not place a limit on the number of documents you can index.

  • Unlimited search queries

    There is no restriction on the number of search queries made by your users.

  • Multiple document format indexing

    (Office 97 up, OOXML, ODF, PDF, RTF, TXT, HTML [aspx, html, asp, jsp...], ZIP, MSG)

  • High-speed index based searching

    By collecting and storing document data within an index, SearchUnit is able to retrieve information quickly and effectively.

  • Open, pure .NET API

    Meet your client’s expectations and your user’s needs by utilizing our open API to implement the search solution you need.

  • Reusable administration web application

    Web-based administration of;

    • Indexing
    • Content/Location assignment
    • Configuration
    • Index deletion

  • The ASP.NET search engine has an optional Windows Service which can be installed for periodic rebuilds.

  • 'Did you mean?' spelling suggestions

    Flexible spelling control checks queries, and includes custom dictionary support for organization acronyms, jargon and names.

  • Content & Location categorization

    Documents within the search engine's index can be assigned to location categories and multiple content categories, giving users choice in which sections of the site are searched.

    Includes User Control source code for total flexibility.

  • Smart search result summary & keyword highlighting

    The search result summary is an extract of the original text showing as many of the search keywords as possible. Summary can include multiple extracts from various parts of the document when searched words are not close enough.

  • Stemming/Lemmas - Word form variations are searched and (optionally) ranked lower

    Word variations are (optionally) included in the search - in the example above the search term "downwards" yielded results with the same stem "downward" which were ranked lower (optional through an adjustable factor). Similarly a search for "downward" would yield results with "downwards", etc.

  • Complex expression support; phrases, nested groups, partial matching, NOT, OR and AND

    Brackets indicate grouping, "-" indicates a NOT operator, OR indicates OR logic, AND indicates AND logic (implicit when not specified). Groups can be nested to any number of levels, and may contain any legal expressions (phrases, NOT, OR, AND). Wildcards * can be used to indicate partial matches. Phrases as words surrounded by double quotes ".

  • AJAX based results, filters, autocomplete and document text preview

    Auto-complete displays suggestions as a user types a search term in the search box control. and complete result text preview inline in the website's search results

  • Database/DataSet search

    Import and index rows from databases (MSSQL, Oracle, OLE) or any DataSet.

  • Spider crawler

    Automatic link discovery through the web site spider which reads and indexes pages ready for searching.

  • Filesystem search

    Document indexing by (optionally) recursive scanning of filesystem folders.

  • Templated control

    Quickly modify layout of search results through templates for; header, footer, no-results, result-item, error-message (for invalid search expressions).

  • Extensible and Flexible

    Every customer has their own unique requirements and SearchUnit is flexible and extensible – usually offering multiple implementation options, thanks to its open API and plug-in architecture (all of which is pure .NET).

    For example;

    • maybe your application has a unique way of delivering documents to users, that you want to be searched.
    • or maybe you want to filter out results based on your own logic.
    • or index database records and other meta data but point the results to actual files, or BLOBs.

    These are real world examples that we have helped customers with – let us know your situation and we’ll guide you through it.

  • Indexes/crawls password protected websites

    Username and password combinations can be specified for multiple websites

  • Completely 'Microsoft Indexing Service' independent

    Some search engines require the Microsoft Indexing Service to operate fully, however SearchUnit requires only .NET to be installed.

  • Result DataSource merging

    The SearchResult control optionally works with DataSet objects, which can contain results from any number of resources, such as;

    • SQL database queries
    • XML documents (see included example)
    • Web service results
    • Programmatically generated sets
    • etc.

  • Ignore region support

    Multiple blocks can be marked in web-pages as regions not to be indexed, this is most useful with menu's and other blocks that are repeated on many pages throughout the website.

  • Unicode and non English language support

    Crawls and indexes pages encoded in most encodings (Unicode, UTF-8, ASCII, Cyrillic, Greek etc.) Page encoding is determined by server response or if not specified by server, in the page meta tags. All UI text's are localizable.

    Includes many free spell check dictionaries.

  • Compatible with multiple versions of Microsoft ASP.NET

    Fully compatible with Visual Studio 2008 through 2017 and Microsoft ASP.NET 4.x, 3.5. and 2.0.

  • Section 508 / AA compliant

    SearchUnit complies with Section 508 and W3C AA. Please view the Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT) which outlines the specific accessibility-related features.