Discovery API

The Discovery API is designed to help an application User Interface (UI) access the data and features of underlying search engines, knowledge graphs or other special repositories. Discovery has a REST API that can be used by the UI components and called directly to configure and access search engine features (like from Elasticsearch, OpenSearch or Solr).  

Open

  The API supports the creation of endpoints through configuration by combining different components. 

•  Default Search and Autocomplete endpoints for supported search engines (e.g. Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, Solr)  

• Different configuration for the components of an endpoint: 

  • Sequential 

  • Parallel endpoints 

  • Finite-state machine 

• Query fallbacks 

• Supported components: 

  • Search engine requests for supported search engines (e.g. Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, Solr) 

  • Faceting 

  • Featured snippets with DistilBERT 

  • HTTP requests 

  • Knowledge graph queries with Neo4j 

  • Language detector 

  • Parts-of-speech identification with spaCy 

  • Query snapping for supported search engines (e.g. Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, Solr)  

  • Query vectorization with BERT 

  • Question detector 

  • Request logger 

  • Redirect requests 

• Script processor for custom transformation. Currently supports: 

  • Groovy 

  • Python (through Jython) 

  • JavaScript (though Rhino and Nashorn) 

  • Security filtering for Elasticsearch 

  • Template-based requests 

• MongoDB/Atlas post-processor 

• NLP Service 

• OpenAI API 

• Vector Search 

• Query feedback 

• Engine scoring 

Open

Search UI 

Discovery includes components to help developers create a customized search application User Interface that provides an advanced search experience for users. The UI is adaptable to different branding and functional requirements. 

The basic functionality supported includes: 

• Natural language queries (question) processing with 

  • Knowledge Graph answers  

  • Featured snippets / extractive answers 

  • Details page / answer cards  

  • Generative answers 

  • Vector search 

•  Traditional keyword search queries with 

  • Highly relevant traditional keyword search results 

  • Autocomplete 

  • Pagination 

  • Did you mean? 

  • Query fallbacks 

  • Facet Snapping 

  • Results Feedback 

Traditional keyword search is familiar to most search application users who may type things like “men’s leather jackets.”  Natural language queries are when users ask the search application a full question like “How old is the moon,” expecting a direct answer back.  

Admin UI 

The Discovery product plans include a full, user-friendly Admin UI. A command line interface to admin (AdminCLI) as well as a JSON API are available in the interim.