Announcing Zendesk Help Center Search Improvements

We are happy to announce that Help Center search is now powered by an all-new infrastructure, which enables us to move faster and make improvements our customers have been asking for.

On top of this new infrastructure, we’ve already started adding value for our users. The following features are now available to all customers:

• Fuzzy search for Instant Search
• Phrase boosting
• Community post vote boosting
• Optimized support for additional languages.

These improvements are available to all customers, both via web search and Help Center search API.

We are also improving our Help Center Search API. We’ve added two exciting new features:

• Ability to search across all brands and filter by brand
• Ability to sort results by article and community post created date or updated date

This article contains the following sections:

• Why did we make this change?
• How does it work?
• When will this be available in my account?

Why did we make this change?

We talked to many customers who were unhappy with the search results and their ranking in our Help Center search. Many had to use external search providers to achieve an acceptable end-user experience. We’ve decided to invest more in our Help Center search engine and start adding features and improvements.

How does it work?

Fuzzy search

Fuzzy search 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.

For example, if you search for “user segmemt,” the search engine will also return results containing “user segment”.

Phrase boosting

This means that, 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”.

Community post vote boosting

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.

Optimized support for 19 languages

For content written in certain languages, we apply specific optimizations, such as stemming and stop words. The Help Center search is aware of the stemming rules and the stop words for a number of languages that together make up almost 99% of all searches performed by end-users.

We are currently optimizing searches in the following 19 languages: English, Spanish, Portuguese, German, French, Italian, Dutch, Romanian, Russian, Bulgarian, Greek, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Persian, Arabic, Indonesian, Hindi and Thai.

All other languages benefit from basic search support.

Search API support for brand filtering

Before, the Help Center Search API only returned results from the current brand. We have now added 2 additional parameters:

• multibrand: enables search across all brands if true. Defaults to false if omitted
• brand_id: search only returns results from the specified brand

Example:

GET /api/v2/help_center/articles/search.json?query={search_string}&brand_id={brand id}

GET /api/v2/help_center/articles/search.json?query={search_string}&multibrand=true

Search API support for result sorting

We have added support for created date and updated date sorting, for both articles and community posts. These 2 new parameters are available:

• sort_by: choose between ‘created_at’ and ‘updated_at’. Defaults to sorting by relevance.
• sort_order: can be ‘asc’ or ‘desc’. Defaults to ‘desc’

When will this be available in my account?

All the features described in this article have been rolled out to all customers.

More details about Help Center search here.

More about Help Center Search API here.