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

There are many factors that influence how likely an article is to surface including the article’s title, labels, and body content. Suggested articles will follow the same logic as a traditional end-user search as described in this article. That said, 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, content, or adding labels to the article. For example, if users are consistently misspelling a word, it may be helpful to add that misspelling to the article as a label. Making the article a better match for common end-user searches will allow your users to better serve themselves.

Google Analytics can help you identify how your customers are using search. For more information on using Google Analytics with Zendesk, see the article: Enabling Google Analytics for your help center.