The Search Sandbox is included as part of the toolset for diagnostically looking at the data that is being returned from BravoSearch and observing what is traveling over the wire.  It's intended as a tool to interact directly with the indexing and return what should be represented on the client site with more diagnostic information.

The selection of the index, is slightly more complicated than the index as a whole, but instead represents a search configuration for the interaction with the index that is in question. The configuration can contain explicitly more data about the configuration of the client install of BravoSearch. These configuration files contain all of the information that is specific to the client implementation of the code

This is the main search, any request that is typed into the box should reflect in the same was as a user on the end website. The rendered results should match 1-1 what is showing up on the site.  So if you are attempting to figure out if the search on your website is working as you would expect it to running an example query in the sandbox should give you a good example of what you are expecting on the website.  It should also be noted that if you are experiencing issues from within your website, this tool will make it easier to diagnose if the problem exists on the BravoSearch side or on the consumer site.

What you will see coming out of the search results may look a little funny from the search results that you see when they are on the website.  The reason for this is that you are seeing the raw data that is being returned from the service.  This can be helpful in figuring out if the data is coming back from the service when attempting to see if the information is properly indexed.  It can also be helpful in diagnosing conditional display logic that is built into the front end of the template.  

The search request should show you the base of the information that is traveling over the wire during the communications process. This can be used to diagnose why certain parts of the application behave in some ways while the others operate differently. This information includes the data that is specified in the configuration that was selected when the index was selected.

This is the raw response that is returned from the server before it is transformed into the results that are visible on the page.  Only information that is returned from the search engine can be shown in the final results. Use this raw data to attempt to debug search results that you are expecting to come back from the service. This value will be null until the service has been called and the results have been returned.