Your readers can search your knowledge base in two ways:
- Entering a word or phrase in the search box (text search). If they don't hit Enter, we'll perform a quick keyword-based autosuggest search. Once they hit enter, we run both a Keyword search and a Semantic search to generate a full set of search results ranked by relevance. This means your readers can use traditional keywords like "cancel account" or can use more conversational things like "How do I delete my account?". Keyword search matches on the exact keywords; semantic search matches on the intent and so will know that deleting your account is similar to cancelling your account, and will return results appropriately.
- Entering a colon followed by a tag name (tag search). This only pulls articles with a given tag. It performs no other searching or ranking.
If you only learn one thing about our search, it's this:
You don't have to add tags or search phrases
As long as you're entering words in your article's title and body (and for keywords, the permalink and summary), you don't need to do anything extra for that content to show up in search; it just does. 😊
When you publish an article, or you save changes to an already-published article, we reindex that content for search. (We also index Custom content categories and Topic display categories.)
Here's what we automatically index:
| Article editor field | Indexed for keyword search? | Indexed for semantic search? |
|---|---|---|
| Title | Yes | Yes |
| Body | Yes | Yes |
| Permalink | Yes | No |
| Summary | Yes | No |
| Search phrases | Yes | No |
| Embedded PDF content | Yes, but only if PDF is under 100 pages | No |
You can remove some of the keyword indexed fields from your search ranking; refer to Search fields for more information.
Both text search and tag search support an autosuggest search, which will suggest relevant articles or tags as your reader types, and a full search results page, which will display far more detailed search results.
Set up search
Refer to Set up search for setup instructions. Already have search set up but not happy with the results? Refer to Optimize search for some guidance on where to begin your fine-tuning efforts.
Learn more
To learn more about the different types of search and how readers use them, refer to Search your knowledge base.
Getting asked a lot of questions about what's happening behind the scenes? Refer to How search works: advanced for more information.
Or check out the Search FAQs for answers to commonly asked questions.