Searching Chinese in Sitecore using dtSearch/Lucene

Question

Were looking at building a Chinese site (Traditional and Simplified) in Sitecore and was wondering where the possibilities for supporting the search.

From what I have been able to gather so far:

• Lucene doesn't support it out of the box but can be extended through development or third party to allow Chinese search
• dtSearch should support it but from what I've been able to find it is unreliable/untested.

Does anyone have any experience using Chinese language in Sitecore and performing searches? Has anyone had any experience implementing Chinese into Lucene?

Any help would be appreciated.

Cheers, Phil

Answer 1

Cove Enterprise Search supports Chinese and integrates well with Sitecore. You should double check their full language support list if you have other needs.

http://www.coveo.com/en/technology-platform/coveo-platform-version-6-5/connectivity/web-site-search/sitecore-cms

Supported languages on Page 4: http://www.coveo.com/~/media/Files/Support/Knowledge-Base/information-articles/Administration-Tool-Help_Coveo-Enterprise-Search6.ashx

Answer 2

Sitecore 7 ContentSearch features could help you out of the troubles; the search functionality supports many different languages including Chinese, Arabic, and non-UTF based characters.

I have tried to search Chinese (Traditional and Simplified) in sitecore 7 backend search tab. If you have played sitecore 7, you may notice that every content item has a new search tab. You can try to create a content item with 2 different language versions (zh-TW, zh-CN: Traditional, Simplified), then search some Chinese keyword in the search tab, it works fine.

For different language analyzers configuration, please find the Sitecore.ContentSearch.Lucene.DefaultIndexConfiguration.config in the App_Config/Include folder, there already defined many language analyzers for searching, you can also add the Chinese analyzer (Luncene.Net.Analysis.Cn.ChineseAnalyzer).

There is a "developer's_guide_to_item_buckets_and search_sc7" document on the sdn site(http://sdn.sitecore.net), it provides more details.

Hope these can help you.