To look at content across your enterprise with information retrieval, you need to connect into data sources. And that’s done through connectors, which enables you to plug into a content source using a crawler or push mechanism.
A crawler crawls through all connected sources to extract data, regardless of whether that data is structured or unstructured.
Structured data is formatted in a way that makes it searchable with SQL queries; e.g., Excel files, product inventory, and customer names.
Unstructured data is not formatted in a highly structured way; e.g., text files, audio, video, and social media postings.
A Push API exposes services that allow you to push items and their permission models into a source, and security identities into a security identity provider, rather than letting standard Coveo crawlers pull this content.