AEM Assets Search Best Practices

Adobe Experience Manager Assets provides robust asset search methods that help you achieve higher content velocity. Sometimes, finding the right asset can be arduous and time-consuming. Therefore, search assets capability in Adobe Experience Manager Assets is central to the usage of a digital asset management system - be it for further use by creatives, for robust management of assets by the business users and marketers, or for administration by DAM administrators.

This help document contains AEM search best practices with the help of various scenarios to assist AEM users to perform basic to advanced level search.

Access Experience Manager Search access-experience-manager-search

Following are the basic steps to perform in Experience Manager before you begin your search:

Basic Search basic-search

Scenario 1: Perform a basic search using a classic car as the search keyword.

The keyword search is not case-sensitive and is a full-text search across the metadata fields that are included in the Asset full text search index (configurable in the index definition). If more than one keyword is used, AND is the default operator between the keywords, thus, it considers a search for ‘classic car’ to be ‘classic AND car’.

The search results that match all search terms in metadata fields are displayed first, followed by the search results that match any of the search terms in the smart tags. The approximate order of display of search results is:

Specify classic car as the search keyword and click Search. You can view the search suggestions in a drop-down list as you type the keyword. The search suggestions are based on the contents of the search index on your Experience Manager deployment. If you cannot view the appropriate assets in the drop-down menu, press the Enter key to view the list of results. The results are sorted by relevance, starting from the closest matches.

You can make the search more specific by adding your search keyword in double quotes (" "). This search only includes Assets which contain the specified terms together. The search criteria look like - "classic car". Therefore, the search results with both terms classic and car are shown.

The search displays similar results if you are working in the Assets view as well.

Files and folders files-folders

Scenario 2: Search for all files using the classic car keyword within the automobile folder.

Files and folders filter helps you narrow down your search. Use Files, Folders, or Files and Folders options available in the drop-down list based on your requirement. The option to choose among Files, Folders, or Files and Folders is accessible in the Admin view only. In the Assets view, go to Path and browse the folder where you want to perform a search.

To achieve this scenario, execute the steps below:

Operators operators

Scenario 3: Search for Classic Car or Car keywords using various operator combinations to narrow down your search.

To execute the above scenario in Admin view, you can use a combination of various operators to enhance your search experience. The supported operators are:

AND operator and-operator

AND operator is the default operator between two keywords in Omni Search. For example, when you type classic car in the search bar, the results with classic and car keywords appear in your search results, by default.

OR operator or-operator

When you want to be specific with the search results and want an option in the search results, you can use the OR operator. For example, the classic OR car keyword provides search results with the either of keywords in their metadata.

NOT operator not-operator

When you want to retrieve results excluding some keywords, you can use the NOT operator. The NOT operator uses the hyphen (-) symbol to direct AEM search what to exclude from the search results. For example, the car - classic search query that specifies metadata that contains car but excludes classic.

Similarly, you can search for all cars but not jeep. The query looks like: car - jeep. It displays all the assets with metadata car but excludes assets with metadata jeep.

Assets view does not support the usage of Operators.

Wildcards wildcards

Wildcards are used to replace one or more characters in the search. To execute the above scenario in Admin view, you can use a combination of various wildcards to enhance your search experience. There are two wildcards used to perform the search - Question mark (?) and Asterisk (*). Question mark symbol is used to search a single character, whereas, asterisk symbol is used to search multiple characters.

Question mark (?) question-mark

The question mark symbol can be used as a conditional operator to ease your search in Experience Manager.

Asterisk (*) asterisk

Asterisk is a wildcard operator that is used to broaden your search by typing fewer characters. When you know the starting characters of the asset that you are searching for, but do not know the rest, you can use the asterisk operator in your search. For example, the *car query returns all the assets with postfix car available in their metadata. The results could be classic car, sports car, classic and sports car, and so on. Below are a few examples of using the asterisk operator in various ways:

Assets view does not support the usage of Wildcards.

Filters filters

Adobe Experience Manager provides various search filters which you can use to refine and segment your search using a scoped query. When you are unsure about the title or meta description of an asset, you can use various search filters to make your search more relevant. You can use search filters with or without typing a keyword. To open the filters panel in the Admin view, click the GlobalNav icon and select Filters. Whereas, to open the filters panel in Assets view, click Filters beside the search bar.

You can select single or multiple filters to refine your search in Adobe Experience Manager.

Scenario 4: Search for unpublished PDF file type documents with the classic car keyword in it.

Execute the following steps in Admin view:

Execute the following steps in Assets view:

Scenario 5: Search for all images except PNG

When you are unsure about the title or meta description of an asset, you can use various search filters to make your search more relevant. For example, to search assets in Admin view, follow the steps below:

To search assets using the mentioned scenario in Assets view, follow the steps below:

Advanced search advanced-search

AEM search allows you to craft complex search queries with less effort. Following are the various examples to help you create complex search queries:

Scenario 6: Search for all documents in the Experience Manager repository with classic car in their metadata. The content of the document must contain classic car keyword in it.

Adobe Experience Manager allows you to add multiple criteria to your search. You can use a combination of keywords, operator(s), and filter(s) to narrow down your search results.

To perform a search for scenario 6:

Scenario 6 is not possible to execute in Assets view as it does not support the usage of Wildcards.

Scenario 7: Search for all documents in the Experience Manager repository in which the content of the document must include car but exclude classic. The same condition applies on metadata of an asset.

To perform a search for scenario 7:

Type the car - classic keyword in the search bar. Navigate to the filters panel and select Documents under File Type. The priority order of search is based on the following:
Priority 1: Metadata
Priority 2: Smart Tags

Scenario 7 is not possible to execute in Assets view as it does not support the usage of Wildcards.

Scenario 8: Search for metadata tags with metadata jeep

You can capture a specific criteria using various search filters. Tag is a keyword that is assigned to an asset to make it identifiable among a large number of assets. For example, in this scenario, search for assets with jeep tags in it. To do this, type tags:jeep in the search bar. Only assets that meet this criteria are listed in the search results.

The search displays similar results if you are working in the Assets view as well.

Scenario 9: Find similar match for red color car

While performing your search on AEM, you can filter your results by showing similar assets to the selected ones. You can use the Find Similar option to narrow down your search to the exact or similar match of the searched Asset. This helps finding assets which have similar smart tags to the selected asset. For example, when you want to search for alike assets, execute the following steps:

Execute the following steps in Assets view:

Custom search facets custom-search-facets

Search facets in Adobe Experience Manager let you search for assets in multiple ways rather than in a single, pre-determined, or taxonomic order. You can customize search facets and add predicates as per your requirement. Read Search Facets for the step-by-step guide about adding a custom predicate.

Scenario 10: Search specific assets based on their last modified or expiry date

Date constraints allow you to narrow down your custom search to a particular period, for example, using the time period search filters. To search for the above requirement, type classic car in the search bar. Select the date range in the Created Date and Last Modified date filters.

The search displays similar results if you are working in the Assets view as well.

Boosting relevance of keywords boosting-keywords

You can improve the relevance of keywords for particular assets to help boost searches based on the keywords. In other words, the images for which you promote specific keywords appear at the top of the search results when you search based on these keywords.

Notable things while performing a search in Experience Manager notable-things

Differences between Admin view and Assets view Search differences-asset-and-admin-view