Search your site

How to

1. Use Search
2. Insert a Search Front End
3. Create a Search Results Page
4. Indexing your Site
5. General Searching Advice
6. Create good descriptions in search results

Searching

To search for an item on your website:

1. Type your search keywords in the text box and click the search button.

2. You will be taken to the search results page.  If no results have been found in your search, try editing your keywords before clicking search again.

3. Each result will show the page title, a short description of that page's contents and a percentage showing how closely the results are believed to match your search term. The title for each result acts as a link to the full page.

3. Select the result that best matches your search query to view the full page. Select the 'Next' link to view more results.

Setting up a Search Front End

Search Forms may be located anywhere within your website. However please remember that they will only function propperly once a search results page has been created.  You will need to be logged in to perform this task.

To insert a search form:

1. If you would like your search form to appear in the same position on every page of your website, we recomend creating and implementing the form as a part of your Masterpage.
2. Click the 'Insert' button located in the position on the page where the Search form is required.

3. This will launch the 'Insert Content' window. Click 'Miscellaneous'.

4. The Miscellaneous Object Manager will launch.  If a Search Form has already been created it will be visible in the list of objects under 'title'.  If it has not yet been created click 'Add Object'.

5. Clicking the 'Add Object' button will launch the list of Miscellaneous Objects similar to that shown below.

Choose the 'Initial Search Box'. It will now be placed in the Manager for Miscellaneous Objects.

6. Choose the 'searchfrontend' by clicking the 'Insert' button on the same line.

7. The Search Form will be placed on the page. If you require the Search Form moved up or down, left or right see Moving a Page.

8. Once you have created a Search Form on your website you may wish to edit the settings. Select the 'Click to Edit' bar above your Search Form.

An 'Edit' menu will appear on the left hand side of your screen. Select the 'Edit Settings'.

9. When you edit this object you will come to a page looking like this.

Choose the URL of the Search Results page. If you do not yet have a Search Results Page, you should create one before continuing. See Creating a Search Results Page below.

The mandatory red writing indicates that this is necessary. The search function will not work before a results page is in place.

Creating A Search Results Page

In order to view your search results, you must first follow these steps:

1. Use Page Manager to create a page where search results can be shown.
2. Edit the created page layout to suit your needs.
3. You should now locate an area on the page where search results can be displayed. Please note that you will probably need to place search results somewhere in the middle of the page as they take up a lot of room. A main content area is recommended.
4. Click INSERT when in editing mode and insert a Miscellaneous object.
(This object is inserted and created in the same manner as the Search Front End has been described above. See Insert a Search Front End if you would like to revise this step with images.)
5. In the list of available objects should find one called 'search results'. If not then you might need to 'add' it first to the list.
6. Click 'insert' next to the search frontend object.

Once you have inserted the Search Results Object you can edit the way the results display.

• Select 'Click to Edit'

The 'Edit' menu, like the one below, will appear on the left hand side of your screen.

Select 'Edit Settings' and the Search Result Settings window will open. The way you present your search results can vary. Remember you can customise almost every part of the results screen.

Select the 'SAVE' button once you are happy with your settings and styles. See Style Manager for more information on editing styles.

Indexing your Site

Your search should be in working order as soon as the site has been indexed. Indexing is the act of classifying and providing an index in order to make items easier to retrieve. You need to inform Netagi that the site needs to be indexed once your Search Form and Results pages have been made. E-mail info@netagi.com with this request. This request is required once after the initial setup of your search engine. Indexing is also required after altering the 'Metadata Filter Options'. Indexing is updated once per day. Any saved changes that are made to your web site content will be reflected in your search within 24 hours.

Metadata Filter Options

These are options which give a searching user additional assistance with their search. Once you have ticked these options in the Search Results Edit screen, you need your site indexed again. Contact info@netagi.com with this request.

Once the index has been made any user searching the site can use these extra filters to illiminate irrelivant results.

When indexing your site some Metadata is extracted from your pages, primarily who Created the page, the Title, the Description as well as the Subject the page deals with. If any of these are enabled then you can allow users to switch from traditional search methods (Searching the document itself) to searching entirely on Metadata. This becomes useful when pages on your site have Metadata assigned to them - for example if a visitor wants to select only pages which deal with "Games" then they would choose to filter only by Subject for the word "Games". Failing to do this would return a list of all pages which contain the word "Games" but don't necessarily have much to do with Games catalogues.

Searching with Metadata

A visitor is now given access to the 'advanced' tab allowing them to customise how the results are returned during a search.

Any changes the user make on their search will only ever affect how they view the site and do not change any part of the search for other users.

By selecting any of the Metadata Options a user now forfeits the ability to search the text of the document itself - at least until they de-select the Metadata search attributes in the advanced screen.

Attachments

If your site is configured to support this feature, it is possible that the search engine will also index those attachments that are somehow linked to your site locally. (ie: links to external documents will not be indexed but locally saved attachments will be). The Netagi Aplinx Search Engine will search all major types of files and information about the attachment will be shown in the search results screen where relevant. It supplies information about the type of attachment as well as free and commercial methods of opening them.

General Searching Advice

The search tool is exceptionally powerful and offers the users a large variety of options regarding their search. A 'Help' tooltip is available to explain some of the features of the search. A full guide to searching is available as follows:

Searching

When conducting a search simply type in the words that you are searching for. ie:

Searching for foo bar will return all results that contain the words "foo" and "bar"

Reserved Words

Because the system makes use of the words and, or and not (not case sensitive) it is necessary to place these words in quotes when conducting a search.

Searching for foo or bar will return all pages that contain EITHER "foo" or "bar". Normally pages that do not contain BOTH words will be omitted but by using 'OR' we can force the search to look for either word.

Searching for foo not bar will return all pages that contain "foo" but not "bar"

Searching for foo 'not' bar will return all results containing "foo" and "not" and "bar"

Parentheses

You can use parentheses to group words as shown:

Searching for (dalmations and 'one hundred') not (cruella or deville) will return all pages containing the words dalmations and 'One Hundred' but omit those which also contain cruella or deville. Using the quotes around the words 'one' and 'hundred' forces the search to only return those pages that have those words in that sequence - 'one five hundred' contains the word 'five' in the middle and is not relevant to the search.

Searching for dalmations and 'one hundred' and not cruella or deville will return different results as the search will interprate it as 'return all pages that contain dalmations AND 'one hundred' as well as those that either don't contain cruella OR do contain 'deville'

Wildcards

The use of wildcards, a single * located after a word, is valid. If the wildcard is located within the word invalidates the query.

Searching for libra* will return all results containing, for example, 'Librarian', 'Libraries' or 'Libra'

however,

Searching for *Libra or Li*ra will not return any results at all.

Making good descriptions in search results

You may notice that some of your search results appear to have the same descriptions, that do not neccessarilly relate to the page.

Why? The descriptions (as shown in the example image below) are derived from the first elements on the page. Dependant on your template, the first elements on your page may be the banner, menu and perhaps a login box. Often this content can fill the description area before any relevant text is seen.

How can you fix this? In Page Manager Aplinx has a feature called Search Stuff. Here you may define a description for each page that will show on these search results.

Please note: descriptions will be updated when the site is next indexed - this is not instantly updated. Please see the section on indexing above.