Why do my articles not appear in suggested articles on requests or Help Center search?

Question

My search terms seem like they would apply to one of my articles, but the intended article does not appear when I search. Why does that happen?

Answer

As described in this article, the Help Center end-user search (which is relied upon for both traditional search and suggested articles when an end-user types a subject on a ticket form), takes certain factors into consideration including an article's title, labels, and body content. Taking this into consideration, there are a couple of other factors which may impact your articles:

Spelling

Your query is not spelled correctly. Search does not assume what a searched word should be. So if the word is misspelled, you may not see any results.

Relevance

Additionally, the search is looking for a 2/3 match of search terms to the article content. If an end-user uses an entire sentence as a search query, but over 1/3 of those terms do not appear in your article(s), there may be a lack of articles returned by a particular search.

Resolution

In both of these cases, you could consider modifying the article title or content, or adding labels to the article. Labels would be less apparent to the end-user, but if people are consistently misspelling a word, it may be helpful to add that misspelling to an article as a label to help them find the intended content. Making the article a better match for common end-user searches will allow your users to better serve themselves.