Configure search

Pagination allows your readers to view all possible search results. By default, we return the top 20 articles ranked by relevance. 

If you enable pagination, we will display the total search results beneath the search bar and allow the reader to paginate through all the results. They can use the next and back arrows to move between pages, jump to a particular page, or jump to the first and last page.

To enable pagination:

1. Go to Settings > Search.
2. In the Results section, check the box next to Pagination.
   Pagination setting checkbox
3. Save.

Search results are sorted by relevance by default. The goal is to show the most relevant articles at the top of the results. However, sometimes a reader might want to find the most popular, newest, or most recently updated article in the results.

If you enable sorting, we display a sorting dropdown menu below the search bar. Readers will be able to sort the results in the following ways:

• Relevance (default, based on search relevance algorithm only)
• Popularity (total views)
• Last updated (date modified)
• Newest (date created)
  
  

To enable sorting:

1. Go to Settings > Search.
2. In the Results section, check the box next to Sorting.
   
3. Save.

If you're using Glossary, you can choose to display glossary terms that match the search phrase at the top of search results. Here's how it works:

• If your reader searches a phrase that exactly matches a glossary term, the term and its definition will be displayed in a box at the top of the search results.
• The glossary search result also includes a link to the specific letter in the Glossary that this term falls under.
• You can add custom CSS to style this box however you'd like.

To enable the setting:

1. Go to Settings > Search. (Or, from the Glossary page, click the Edit in settings link next to "Definitions at the top of the search results.")
2. In the Glossary snippets section, check the box next to "Display glossary definition for matching term."
   
3. Save your changes.

You can now run a search for a glossary term and see it appear at the top of search results:

Sample search showing a matching glossary term at the top

If you're using Contextual Help Widget (2.0), these search results will also be displayed in widget searches:

With glossary snippets enabled, see Style the glossary snippet search results to give these results the look and feel you want! Don't like the word "Glossary"? Use the Search section of the Customize Text tool to change the text that appears there!

By default, your glossary page doesn't show up in search results. This means that if a reader types "glossary" in search, they won't get any results, or at least won't get the glossary page as a result.

But you can set it so that someone searching for "glossary" will get the glossary page as a result.

To enable this option:

1. Go to Settings > Search. (Or, from the Glossary page, click the Edit in settings link next to "Definitions at the top of the search results.")
2. In the Glossary snippets section, check the box next to Display link to glossary when "glossary" is searched for.
   
3. Save your settings.

Now, when a reader searches for "glossary", they'll see an option to View Glossary at the top of the search results:

You can change the look and feel of that section using the Style the glossary snippet search results options, too!

Don't like the wording for "View Glossary"? Never fear--use the Search section of the Customize Text tool to change it. 😉

Have you used the Customize Text tool to change the word "Glossary" to something else on the Glossary page itself? Never fear! This setting will apply to both the word "glossary" and whatever custom text string you've used!

Article blurbs are the summary information displayed under search results. By default, we display highlighted search term fragments, but you can override this to display the meta description or default article blurb instead.

Highlighted search term fragments

To change your search result article blurbs:

1. Go to Settings > Search.
2. Make a selection in the Article Blurbs section:
   Article blurbs section
3. Save.

What does each setting do?

• Display highlighted search term fragments (default): This will display dynamic fragments of text from the article with the search term highlighted.
• Display meta description or default article blurb: This will display the meta description for the article, if one exists; otherwise it will display the first 150-ish characters from the article, including any code or HTML.
• Use meta description as article blurb in search results and category pages (recommended): When checked, this will force the search results to display the meta description (even if it's empty). It will also display the article's meta description on any category landing pages, instead of using the first 150-ish characters of the article body. We strongly recommend keeping this box checked regardless of the display option you've selected above it.

Highlighted search terms vs. Meta description

We default article blurbs to display highlighted search term fragments for a few reasons:

• It's consistent with how Google and other search engines display results
• It provides context for the search result, and that can help readers get to the information they want faster
• Showing search terms in context can help readers figure out other search terms that might help them find what they need better

For many customers, this is just generally an intuitive search setting.

However, there are some cases where this doesn't make sense. If your articles frequently use the same word repeatedly in the same sentence, the fragment blurbs can almost seem noisy or cluttered. You might also want to use meta descriptions when you have a lot of similarly-structured articles and you want to set a clear, succinct meta description to consistently appear in search results.

There is no hard and fast rule about which setting is more ideal: it really depends on how your knowledge base is set up and how readers use it. When readers might be most heavily searching product codes or serial numbers and these fields appear in tables or long lists in articles, meta description might be a much better setting. But where readers are coming in to search for topics or subjects, often the search term fragments are a much better setting.

The good news is that changing this setting instantly takes effect and requires no reindexing for search, so you can very easily toggle it one way and then go back to the other if it isn't working for you.

You can allow your readers to filter search results by category. You can choose to allow filtering by the top-level categories or by both top-level and second-level categories.

When enabled, this option will:

1. Add a Refine dropdown menu to your search bars. This allows your readers to select a category before they search.
   Refine by category dropdowns on search bar
2. Add Refine by Category checkboxes to your search results page. These allow your readers to refine by category from the search results page after they search.
   Refine by category checkboxes on Search Results page

To add these refine by category options for top-level and/or second-level categories:

1. Go to Settings > Search.
2. In the Filters section, check the boxes next to top-level or top-level + second-level categories to add the refine options for those two levels, respectively.
   
3. Save.

Autosuggest controls what kind of search is performed as readers begin typing in the search box, before they hit enter or click the search icon to run a full search. By default, we set autosuggest to return to readers while they type. When either type of autosuggest is enabled, readers will see up to 10 relevant results in a dropdown below the search bar.

To change autosuggest settings, go to Settings > Search.

There are three autosuggestion settings:

• Autosuggest articles to readers while they type: This setting will autosuggest articles as readers type. It is not typo-tolerant. If multiple words separated by spaces are used, it will match and return results on the words independently. For example, if I type "configuring", I will see autosuggestions that contain "configuring". If I type "configuring search", I will get autosuggestions containing either "configuring" or "search":
• Autosuggest articles and include fuzzy results: This setting will autosuggest articles as readers type, and it will also do "fuzzy" matching. Think of this like typo tolerance: searching for "remainder" might bring up articles with "reminder", searching for "good" may bring up articles with "Google". With fuzzy results turned on, the more precise match should bubble to the top of the autosuggestions:
  We recommend this setting with one caveat: for some customers with key search terms that are very close in spelling, it can increase the number of search results you get. So just be sure you test it to be sure it's helpful rather than noisy.
• Do not autosuggest articles: Use this setting if you do not want any autosuggestions to appear as readers type. Readers will need to hit Enter or click the search icon to complete a full search and see any results.

For more details on what happens under the covers in autosuggest, see Autosuggest search.

When you create an article using the option to Share content from an existing article, it is considered a "child" article (the original is considered the "parent".) By default, child articles are excluded from search.

To enable child articles to show up in search:

1. Go to Settings > Search.
2. Next to Shared content articles, uncheck the box next to Prevent child articles from being searched.
   Prevent child articles from being searched checkbox
3. Save.

Have you ever wished you could exclude an entire category's contents from search, all at once? Maybe you have a category where you include content specific to particular customers, where you provide them a URL and otherwise hide that category from search and navigation. Or, you might have a category you use for Internal Reviews, where you publish things that are in-progress to get feedback from subject matter experts, but you don't ever want your general readership to find those resources.

Search result exclusions are usually set in individual articles. They don't get passed from the category to the articles.

So, for example, if I have a category called Enterprise Resources, and it contains subcategories for each of my enterprise customers, I'd have to manually set each individual article to be excluded from search:

• Enterprise Resources
  • Customer 1
    • Article 1 (exclude from search)
    • Article 2 (exclude from search)
  • Customer 2
    • Article 3 (exclude from search)
    • Article 4 (exclude from search)

Excluding content from search this way can be inconsistent, since it depends on your content creators to remember to check the box in each article or for you to create a reader group restriction.

In the Search Settings, you can fully exclude a single category and all of its content from search results. When you use this option, it automatically excludes from search:

• All articles directly within the category
• The main category (if it's topic display or custom content, which are indexed for search)
• All topic display or custom content subcategories
• All articles in the category's subcategories

So, in the above example, if I set my Customer 1 category to be hidden from search, Article 1 and Article 2 would be automatically hidden, even if I didn't check that option in the articles themselves.

If I set Enterprise Resources category to be hidden from search, all four articles would be hidden from search, as would any future articles created for additional customers.

Exclude a full category from search

To exclude a category and all its content from search:

1. Go to Settings > Search.
2. Next to Excluded category, select the gear icon:
   
3. In the pop-up that appears, start typing the name of the category you want to exclude. You'll get an autosuggested list as you type. Click the category you want to select.
4. Then select Exclude Category.
   
5. Once you've made your selection, click Save to save your changes.

All of the content in that category is now excluded from search.

The search index will automatically scrape and index the contents of PDFs in articles. By default, we only index the content of PDFs under 100 pages long.

If you have PDFs longer than 100 pages and you'd like them to be indexed for search, you'll need to change this setting.

To enable indexing of PDFs longer than 100 pages:

1. Go to Settings > Search.
2. In the Index large PDFs section, check the box next to Index the content of PDFs included in articles that are larger than 100 pages.
   Index large PDFs checkbox
3. Save.

Search weights determine the relevance each article field has in search. All fields start with a weight of 1 and have equal relevance in search. You can view your knowledge base's current relevance search weights by going to Settings > Search and looking in the Search Weights section.

Search Weights

The following fields are indexed for search:

• Title
• Permalink
• Body
• PDFs
• Meta description
• Search phrases

Search weights allow you to boost individual search fields. The weight represents how strong of a preference you’d like to give it.

For example, say that you set article titles to a weight of 10 and keep the other fields at 1. The search engine will still try and determine the best match across all fields using relevancy scoring algorithms. If the search finds a similar match in the title of one article and the body of another, the search weight will be used to bump up the score of the article with the matching title and it will rank higher.

See Dig into your weights for more information.

Search testing

Once you've made changes to your search weights, use Search Testing to quickly and easily test changes to search weights to see if they're producing the results you want/expect. The Search Testing section is just below the Search Weights section on Settings > Search.

Type a search term into the test search phrase field and hit enter (or click the magnifying glass). This will give you the search results and relevance score for up to 200 articles.

To see how a change to search weights will affect your results, adjust the weights and click the magnifying glass to refresh the search results. You can see how changes will affect the ranking and scoring of results. 

You can also click on an article to open the editor to view and make adjustments to the searchable fields. Once you've made changes, search again to see how it affects the search results. 

To improve the ranking of an article in search for a given search term, you can optimize the article by making sure the search term appears in the searchable fields. For example, if you want to be able to significantly boost an article for a search term, you can add it as a search phrase and boost the search weight of search phrases.

When you are happy with your weighting, click save to make the changes live. Adjusting search weights does not require a reindex.

Primary search language

The primary search language determines how we perform the stemming to reduce the words to their root form. You can set this in Settings > Search in the Language section:

Why does primary search language matter? The stemming rules for English are different from those for German, French, and so on.  For example...

• In English, possessive "apostrophe s" is removed so that "Pete's" becomes "Pete".
• In French, elisions are removed so that "qu'est" becomes "est".
• In German, characters are normalized so that "hässlich" becomes "hasslich".

Changing your primary search language will require a search reindex.

Our search supports many of the world's most common languages:

• Arabic
• Armenian
• Basque
• Brazilian
• Bulgarian
• Catalan
• Czech
• Danish
• Dutch
• English (default)
• Finnish
• French
• Galician
• German
• Greek
• Hindi
• Hungarian
• Indonesian
• Irish
• Italian
• Kurdish
• Latvian
• Lithuanian
• Norwegian (Bokmål)
• Norwegian (Nynorsk)
• Portuguese
• Romanian
• Russian
• Spanish
• Swedish
• Turkish