Accessing the singleton can be done by using dependency injection.

In a class you can inject the IExamineManager interface:

In a view the IExamineManager can be injected as well:

This returns an active instance of the ExamineManager which exposes operations such as:

• Default index & search providers

• Full collection of index & search providers

• All indexing and searching methods

Searching

Important to note that the Search methods on the ExamineManager will call the Search methods of the default search provider specified in config. If you want to search using a specific provider, there are generally two approaches for this.

If you want to use the searcher of a specific index, you should get the the searcher via the index:

If you have configured a custom searcher that you wish to use instead, you can access the searcher directly via the IExamineManager instance:

An example using a custom searcher is below:

Indexing

When you wanna populate an index, you will need to use the IExamineManager and get the specific index. The build-in index names are all available as constants from the Umbraco.Cms.Core.Constants.UmbracoIndexes namespace

The indexing methods available on a single index are:

Search in Umbraco is powered by Examine out of the box, which is a Lucene-based search and index engine for Umbraco. Umbraco provides everything required to have powerful and fast search up and running on your website. You can also extend or replace the available configuration to exactly match your requirements. This documentation focuses on the Examine implementation.

Examine

Understand how Examine works and walk through the many available options and settings in Umbraco.

Provides an overview of the available Examine functionality available directly within the Umbraco backoffice

Overview

The Umbraco backoffice allows you to view details about your Examine indexes and searchers - all in one place. You can see which fields are being indexed, rebuild the indexes if there's a problem, and test keywords to see what results would be returned.

The Examine Management section, accessible from within the Settings section, is split into two sections: Indexers and Searchers.

Indexers

From the Indexers section, you can view details about each Examine index currently configured within your Umbraco installation. Clicking any of these indexes will show you additional options, each discussed below.

Index info

This section allows you to see the list of properties on the index that you selected, including how many documents and fields are currently being stored.

Within the Indexers it displays the details for the index provider as well.

This can be useful to confirm the configuration that Umbraco is using and to ensure it is working as expected. This section also displays the full file path of the index itself.

This section also provides the ability to rebuild the index, should this be required. Depending on how much content your website has, rebuilding the search indexes could take a while and affect the site performance temporarily, so it is not recommended to do this while the website is under high load.

Fields

From here you can see the default system fields that are stored for each document within the search index. That includes the number of fields document, and the score which is calculated by Examine depending on how closely the individual results matched the search term.

Searchers

From the Searchers section, you can view details about each Examine searcher currently configured within your Umbraco installation. Clicking any of these searchers will take you to a search page, where you can test out your search terms.

You can see an example here how to configure an Examine searcher in the Examine Multisearcher documentation.

Search field

The search field allows you to enter a search term and receive results back from the searcher in question. You can confirm if your query is working as expected. Matching results are returned in their raw format, with the score, document ID and Name being returned. The score is calculated by Examine depending on how closely the individual results matched the search term.

If you want to index PDF files and search for them you will need to use the UmbracoExamine.Pdf extension package.

Installation

Install with NuGet: dotnet add package Umbraco.ExaminePDF

This will create a new Examine index called "PDFIndex", which will appear in "Examine Management" dashboard under the "Settings" section. Using this index you can start searching the contents of any PDF files uploaded to the media section.

Multi-index searchers

A multi-index searcher is a searcher that can search multiple indexes. This can be helpful when you for example want to search both the external and internal indexes. You can register a multi-index searcher with the ExamineManager on startup like:

using Examine;
using Umbraco.Cms.Core;
using Umbraco.Cms.Core.Composing;
using Umbraco.Cms.Core.DependencyInjection;
using UmbracoExamine.PDF;

namespace MySite.MyCustomIndex
{
    [ComposeAfter(typeof(ExaminePdfComposer))]
    public class ExamineComposer : IComposer
    {
        public void Compose(IUmbracoBuilder builder)
        {
            builder.Services.AddExamineLuceneMultiSearcher("MultiSearcher", new[] {Constants.UmbracoIndexes.ExternalIndexName, PdfIndexConstants.PdfIndexName});
        }
    }
}

With this approach, the multi-index searcher will show up in the "Examine Management" dashboard.

The multi-index searcher can be resolved in code from the ExamineManager like this:

if (_examineManager.TryGetSearcher("MultiSearcher", out var searcher))
{
    //TODO: use the `searcher` to search
}