Help Center provides simple full-text search of your content. Help Center search indexes your knowledge base articles and community posts.
When a user enters a search query in Help Center, the search algorithms get to work, looking for indicators of the most relevant results and ranking them. The relevant snippet from the content of your knowledge base article or community post is created.
The search results are then displayed to the end user with snippet and keyword highlighting.
The articles contains the following sections:
- Understanding the relevance score in search results
- Understanding boosts in search results
- Which content is included and excluded in search results
- Improving the search experience for end users
Understanding the relevance score in search results
The ranked search results are based on relevance scores and are displayed to the user in descending order of their scores.
Relevance scores are indicated by a weighted average per field score. A field is a part of a record, representing an item of data. Some examples are:
- Matches in an article or post title field score higher than matches in other fields.
- Matches in article labels score higher than matches in the body field.
These are the current field weights:
Field |
Weight for |
Weight for |
Title |
3 |
3 |
Details |
N/A |
1 |
Body |
1 |
N/A |
Labels |
2.8 |
N/A |
Comment |
1 |
1 |
Section title |
1.5 |
N/A |
Relevance scores are also impacted by a text analysis process that considers the following factors:
- Exact match - Results that exactly match a word in the search string. This scores higher than a stemmed match.
- Stemmed match - Results where a word matches after stemming. For example, the plural form of a word generally matches the singular form.
- Term frequency - Number of matches returned in a single field. Higher term frequency increases the score.
- Field length - Matches in shorter fields score higher than results in longer fields. For example, if you have a single word search, that matches a one-word title, that will score higher than a hit in a long article title with many words.
- Proximity boost - The score is boosted when all the search terms are close together in the same field. For example if all the search terms are included in an article title this puts them in close proximity and gives the result higher relevance.
- Phrase boost - In multiple term queries, exact word order is preferred. For example, when searching for “car park”, results containing “car park” are ranked higher than results containing “park car.”
- Query length - For one and two word queries, the algorithm returns only documents that match all the search words. For longer queries, 40% of the query terms must be present in a document for it to become a search result.
- Overall quantity and quality of relevant results.
Understanding boosts in search results
In addition to text analysis we give extra weight to certain features of articles and posts. These include:
- Article votes - End users can rate articles as “helpful” or “unhelpful” so that over time an article may develop a score like “10 of 50 users found this article helpful.” We give articles with a higher percentage of positive votes a boost so that they show up a higher in results than they otherwise would. The more overall votes an article has weighs in too; for example, an article with a rating of 10 out of 50 gets more weight than one with 10 out of 100.
- Community post votes (requires Guide Professional or Enterprise) - End users can rate community posts as “helpful” or “unhelpful,” just as they can for articles. The percentage of positive votes functions as a boost and makes a certain post rank higher than it otherwise would.
- Labels (requires Guide Professional or Enterprise) - Labels are elements you can use to influence the relevance score of your articles in search results. Consider using labels carefully to balance your Knowledge base search results.
Which content is included and excluded in search results
When you search the Help Center, you are searching all knowledge base articles (first 500 KB of each article) and all community posts, if you have Gather. The default snippet size for a search result is 120 characters, although results can vary slightly because the snippet engine will always try to return a fragment that includes a complete sentence.
When an article or post is returned, the search engine attempts to find a snippet from the document body that matches the search. If there is no match in the document body or comments, an extract from the start of the document body is returned. If there is a match, the search engine divides the article or post into sentences and ranks each sentence based on the number of matches. The score is then normalized by the fragment length to ensure that fragments are not too small.
These items might also be included in the search:
- Restricted content - Only users with permission to access restricted content will see in search results.
- New content - When you add or update content it usually takes only a few minutes before the content is indexed and can be searched.
- Comments - Article and post comments are included in Help Center search results. Comments will show up in the search results as long as the search result snippet is matched in the comment. If there are multiple comment matches within one community post, the algorithm will pick the most relevant comment snippet.
These items are not included in the search:
- Attachments - Content within article attachments is not included in Help Center search.
- My Activities - Search in My Activities in Help Center is limited to tickets and, specifically, tickets you have access to. It does not include articles.
Other relevant features
Fuzzy search
Fuzzy search is available in certain languages and is a process where an article or post is deemed to be relevant to a search query even when there is not an exact match to the search terms in any of its fields. We use this technique to protect users from spelling mistakes.
Unlike stemming, which removes suffixes and prefixes to get to the root of a search term, fuzzy search uses edit distance to identify search results that contain terms close to the query terms. For example, if you search for “user segment” the search engine will also return results containing “user segment”.
The current rule for finding approximate matches is:
- Terms up to maximum two characters must match exactly
- Terms containing three to five characters are allowed one typo
- Terms longer than five characters are allowed two typos
Optimized language support
For content written in certain languages, we apply specific optimizations.
Stemming is language specific. In English, the search engine knows that if you search for the term “films” you also want results that contain the singular form “film.” Similar rules apply to all languages.
Stop words are another language-specific factor. Stop words are the most common words in a language that are usually excluded from the search query to avoid returning too many results. For example, in English, “the” is a stop word.
The Help Center search is aware of the stemming rules and the stop words for a number of languages that together make up up to 99% of all searches performed by end users.
We are optimizing searches in the following languages:
Arabic, Bulgarian, Chinese, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, and Thai.
All other languages benefit from basic search support.
Improving the experience for end users
There are a number of ways that you can improve a user's search experience.
Consider changing the color of search results highlighting in your custom theme. Use CSS to change the appearance of your search results keyword highlighting.
You can use the search analytics dashboard to review Help Center search terms from the last 30 days. For each search term you can see the number of searches for that term, number and type of search results returned (if any), click-through, and the next action taken.
Note: This requires Guide Professional or Enterprise.
Search analytics gives you insight into what your customers are looking for and where they are failing to find answers. To make end users more successful you can analyze search data, then take actions to improve search results and your knowledge base content.
To open the Search Analytics dashboard to review end user search terms
- Click the Reporting icon (
) in the sidebar, then click the Search tab.
Learn more about the options in the dashboard.
Providing tips for your end users to find content more easily
There are a number of operands you can recommend to help end users locate content in search.
- Find multiple words: Use double quotes (") around each word to find content that contains all those words.
For example,"article" "title" "section" "author"
retrieves content that contains all four words, in any order. Make sure you put spaces between the search words, otherwise the search handles the text as one string.
You'll get hits if there is a stemmed version of a word (e.g. articles). You won't get hits where content contains only the words title and section, for example.
If you use single quotes (') around a word, the single quotes are ignored. If you search for'article' 'title' 'section' 'author'
, you'll see hits for all content that contains any of the words title or article or section or author (exactly as if you had searched without the single quotes). - Find a phrase: Use double quotes (") around a phrase to find content that contains all the words in that phrase.
For example,"article title"
retrieves all content that contains the words article and title, in that order. You'll also get hits if there is a stemmed version of the word (e.g. articles). You won't get hits where content contains only the word title, for example.
If you use single quotes (') around a phrase, the single quotes are ignored. - Exclude results containing certain words: Use the minus operator (-) in front of the search term to find content that does not include that word or phrase.
For example, reporting bugs -support returns content containing the words reporting and bugs, but excludes those that contain the word support from the result set. - Combine operands for advanced search: you can combine the operands above to find a very specific set of results.
For example, "reporting bugs" -support returns hits for content that contains both the words reporting and bugs, but does not contain the word support.
90 Comments
We are running into the same issue as @Edouard Madeuf and looking for suggestions
The suggestions are not helpful as the suggestions look the same and it fails to differentiate the different between the links suggested
@Hedda I'm going to generate a ticket on your behalf for our Customer Advocacy team to dig into this further. You'll receive a follow-up email shortly stating your ticket has been created.
@Bill there's no native way to change this functionality. You're most likely looking at custom code within your Guide Theme editor if you want to change what is displayed here.
While I am not able to assist with any sort of custom coding, we do have some great documentation that I believe you will find useful.
Hope this helps!
Thank you!
Hello! Is there a way to see search insights for a specific cohort of people?
My use case is that I'd like to see search insights only for our agents rather than the aggregate of agents and end users. Is this possible?
Thanks!
How does ZenDesk determine what text to feature in the snippet/blurb? Is there anyway to influence/avoid/affect what is displayed in the snippet?
I am finding the snippet highlights different text depending on the last search, with a high preference towards a particular header that is very misleading about the article content (if the article is about A, there's one subsection about B exception and B keeps getting displayed in the search results snippet). Is it as simple as changing the header to paragraph (undesirable but will do it to improve search results), or do I need to find some alternative vocabulary so it doesn't "look" like the rest of the article? What is the secret here?
Is there a way to deprioritize search results? All our weekly release notes are part of our HC, and they show up in the search results (sometimes overwhelmingly). I want the release notes to still be visible to customers, but I think they'd rarely be the article a customer is searching for. Would love to be able to sequester or de-prioritize these somehow.
Is there a way the search results page can show the view permissions on an article? At the very least, the LOCK?
Is there a way to code the search results so that locked articles are returned in a different color font, maybe?
It's important for my support team to know if the article they have found is available publicly before they click it.
Any advice appreciated!
Hey Amy,
The solution you're looking for would most likely require a good amount of custom code. While we're rather limited on what we can assist with on our end, it may be worth having your developers take a look at the following documentation to see if that points them in the right direction:
Customizing your Help Center theme (Guide Professional and Enterprise)
Help Center CSS Cookbook
Help Center Templates Introduction
Help Center Javascript Cookbook
Tips for using HTML to customize your Help Center
Zendesk Partner Directory
Zendesk Themes Directory
If you don't have the necessary resources available to assist with customizing your Help Center, we do have a Professional Services team that can assist at an additional cost. This is something you'll want to discuss with your account manager so if you're interested, I'm happy to get you in touch if needed.
Let me know if you have additional questions for me in the meantime!
hello, any item in the roadmap to get the search of the tickets with the search of the articles ?
Hello Gaetan,
Currently, we have no announcements to make on the development roadmap for Guide. I would recommend posting your requested update on our Guide Product Feedback forums so our developers can consider your request for potential future updates.
Best regards.
Thank you for the quick answer. I do have a follow-up question: in the widget is it possible to search in the tickets instead / or next to the search for articles ?
Hey Gaëtan,
Currently, you can only search for tickets in the agent interface. You won't be able to search for user tickets within the web-widget at this time.
Let me know if you have any other questions!
Hi @Gaëtan,
It might help you to know it's possible to create some code for the search results page that catches when a user searches for a number and when they do it populates a message you've created (we did one that links to the My activities page where end-users can see their requested tickets and tickets they're CC'd on).
The "Find a Phrase" search using double quotes to search an exact phrase does not work for us. When our users use double quotes to search a phrase: (1) They get results with the word "quote" in it (2) The other results returned are not matching the exact phrase in the quotes, but results with any combination of the words, so basically same as not using quotes at all.
Is the double quoted phrase search documented elsewhere as having issues?
Hi.
Question:How can we Lower body's score ( now, it's 1, but we wanna make it to the minimum like 0.0001)
We have so many articles and these articles are so long.
If the article is too long, words tend to get caught and tend to rank higher.
So I'd like to change the weight depends on field.
I found below article in Elastic Search. Is it also possible on zendesk?
Hi,
There isn't a way to go in and change the weight directly on an article. You have to play with the title and tags to try to adjust the search score but it's a lot of trial and error. Wish I could be more helpful!
Thanks,
Maggie
I realize Insight is on it's way out, but I am wondering why the Search Stats only include search terms that were not found.
For example: According to the search stats in Zendesk, only 77 search terms with no results come up for the last 30 days, but Google Analytics shows over 10,000 unique searches and over 4900 search terms for the same period.
Why does Zendesk display only the search terms without results?
Thanks for the help.
Hi Anthony,
If you click on "total," that will show all of the searches that did have at least 1 result, and what those search terms were. That stat and list should show you your search terms.
What you're seeing is that there were 77 terms with no results, i.e. things people searched for that you do not have anything in your knowledge base for. That metric is meant to help knowledge managers identify things their users are searching for that they maybe need to create an article for.
The other thing that may be a factor and causing a discrepancy here is that the stats you see in Insights are tracking searches that occur on your Help Center. Depending how you have Google Analytics set up, you may be comparing searches conducted within your Help Center search to external searches that are bringing people into your site.
I hope that helps; let us know if you have additional questions.
I want to disable Fuzzy search. In a deeply technical KB we rely on exact matches. Is this possible?
Hi Christoph! I spoke with our experts regarding the Fuzzy Search you mentioned. At this point in time, we do not have the feature to disable it as this normally protects the end users from typos.
Please let me know if you have any questions about this.
Hi Erika,
I like to give you a real world example, hopefully this increases the priority to consider a change of the current situation:
Searching für the word 'UPS' returns all entries with the word 'UP'. The latter is found in tons auf articles, it's a commonly used word in english. So searching for this is useless because of fuzzy-search. I do no other software, where you can put words in quotationsmarks, put a plus in front und activate an option to search for the exactly word.
UPS in IT is an abbreviation for "uninterruptible power supply", the boxes which prevent computer and servers from defective databases and such when mains power fails.
Good Afternoon all,
How can I make our search bar, not only search articles found on our page but provide a link to another help center?
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Hello Juan Espinosa,
I would begin by following the steps listed in the article I've linked below. It goes into detail on how to enable your search to utilize multiple help centers. This feature is an Enterprise level feature, so you may need to upgrade your account to implement this on your end.
Enabling search across multiple Help Centers.
Best regards.
Hi Devan - Community Manager,
Thanks for the info, I tried and it's a nice feature however what I am trying to accomplish is the following;
Example scenario -
I land on helpcenter1.zendesk.com it has a search bar, on the search bar i want to type "helpcenter2" and have it present a result that if clicked on would the redirect me to helpcenter2.
In the specific code -
<div class="search-container">
<form role="search" class="search search-full" data-search="" data-instant="true" autocomplete="off" action="/hc/en-us/search" accept-charset="UTF-8" method="get"><input name="utf8" type="hidden" value="✓"><input type="search" name="query" id="query" placeholder="Search our frequently asked questions" autocomplete="off" aria-label="Search our frequently asked questions">
<input type="submit" name="commit" value="Search"></form>
</div>
What would I need to change?
Is there a placeholder that can be added to the title of an article that will match anything?
Use Case:
Our users consistently enter in error messages into the search. We would like to be able to provide an article explaining the error message. That way users will get more information about an error and then decide if they would like to submit a ticket anyway.
The issue here is that the error message generally contains information specific to the customer and therefore would be impossible to create articles for each error message for each customer.
Example Error Message: ALERT: FileSystem "/opt/local/forgdiam/DATA" utilization status at "awva-pclap02519" is Warning
If we create an article with any variation of ALERT: FileSystem "XXX" utilization status at "XXX" is Warning
The article does not come up when searching but if the user removes the text in the first set of quotes then the article will show up. Currently, we are not in a position to change the wording of the error.
Ideal Situation/Resolution:
We could create an article like ALERT: FileSystem "XXX" utilization status at "XXX" is Warning
Where the XXX would match whatever information was provided. This would allow any customer to find the article explaining the error.
Resolution Requirements:
When a user searches using the error message that includes information specific to them an article will come up explaining the error message.
Active Feature Request (please vote):
I just posted a Feature Request for this at the link below. If you would like to see this feature please head over there and show your support. Please make sure to add an upvote and comment even if it is simply a "+1"
https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/360046927413-Feature-Request-Create-a-placeholder-that-can-be-placed-in-a-Guide-Article-that-will-match-anything-when-searched
Active Feature Request (please vote):
Feature Request: Add the ability to disable Fuzzy search
Christoph Schulze
I just posted a Feature Request for this at the link below. If you would like to see this feature please head over there and show your support. Please make sure to add an upvote and comment even if it is simply a "+1"
Also, you may consider adding it to your post to get the feature request more visible.
https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/360046767874-Feature-Request-Add-the-ability-to-disable-Fuzzy-search
Active Feature Request (please vote):
Feature Request: Add a way to deprioritize search results
Erik Johnson
I just posted a Feature Request for this at the link below. If you would like to see this feature please head over there and show your support. Please make sure to add an upvote and comment even if it is simply a "+1"
Also, you may consider adding it to your post to get the feature request more visible.
https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/360046933973-Feature-Request-Add-a-way-to-deprioritize-search-results
Active Feature Request (please vote):
Feature Request: Add the ability to determine what text to feature in the snippet/blurb
Angela Frey
I just posted a Feature Request for this at the link below. If you would like to see this feature please head over there and show your support. Please make sure to add an upvote and comment even if it is simply a "+1"
Also, you may consider adding it to your post to get the feature request more visible.
https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/360046767834-Feature-Request-Add-the-ability-to-determine-what-text-to-feature-in-the-snippet-blurb
Still hoping for someone to address Angela's question from a year ago: "How does ZenDesk determine what text to feature in the snippet/blurb? Is there anyway to influence/avoid/affect what is displayed in the snippet?"
Hi Zendesk team - am I OK to post your section "Providing tips for your end users to find content more easily" on my knowledge base? Wasn't sure if that was a section we could grab and repurpose for ourselves. Thanks!
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