Help center performs a full-text search of your knowledge base articles, community posts, and if Federated search is enabled and if configured, external content such as blogs or websites.
When a user enters a search query in the 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, community post, or external content is created and the search results and relevant search filters are displayed on the search results page.
Note: Help center search is one way to search for content in your help center. For information about other search methods, see Understanding help center search methods.
The articles contains the following sections:
- Which content is included and excluded in search results
- Understanding the relevance score in search results
- Understanding boosts in search results
- Other relevance features
- Improving the search experience for end users
Which content is included and excluded in search results
When you search the help center, you are searching all knowledge base articles (first 10,000 characters of each article) in your native help center. Your search can also include the following:
- Articles and community posts from other help centers in your application, if multiple help centers are enabled and search has been configured to include results from those help centers. See Enabling search across multiple help centers.
- Content from external sources, if federated search is enabled and search has been configured to include results from external content. See About Zendesk Federated Search.
Articles and community posts
When an article, post, or external content 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.
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.
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.
- Hyperlinks - URLs within the document body and linked text are included in Help Center search results.
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.
External Content
If external content is available, the title of the external content is displayed along with a link to open the content in a new browser tab and a snippet from the document body that matches the search. If there is no match in the document body, an extract from the start of the document body is returned.
External content source types and filters are defined during search crawler setup or during federated search API configuration. See About Zendesk Federated Search.
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 |
Weight for external content |
Title |
3 |
3 |
3 |
Details (Body of a community post) |
N/A |
1 |
N/A |
Body |
1 |
N/A |
1 |
Labels |
2.8 |
N/A |
N/A |
Comment |
1 |
1 |
N/A |
Section title |
1.5 |
N/A |
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.
- Semantic search -Guide has begun to use semantic search as a way to improve the ranking and generate the most accurate search results possible based on the intent and context of user search queries. Semantic search is being rolled out in phases to all content types, languages, and search channels. See About semantic search and how it works.
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.
Other relevance 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 segmemt” 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
Fuzzy search is not available in Japanese, Korean, and Chinese help center languages.
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, Burmese, Chinese, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Khmer, Korean, Norwegian, Persian, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, 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. See Analyzing help center search results with Explore.
To access the Search dashboard in Explore
- In the Zendesk product tray, click the Explore icon (
).
- From the list of dashboards, select the Zendesk Guide dashboard.
- Click the Search tab.
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.
Note: Do not repeat the same word after a minus operator (-). For example, the search"cannot send -cannot set"
repeats the word “cannot” and therefore won’t return any results. Instead, search for"cannot send -set"
so that the search returns results excluding the articles that contain the phrase “cannot 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.
56 comments
Nicky Clark
Is there a way to disable or reduce fuzzy search? We have clients complaining that they struggle to figure out which articles are helpful to them because the search results return so many possible matches, and they feel overwhelmed.
A good example is that I just searched for "gender" and had 34 possible matches returned. Only 2 of our articles actually contain the word gender - the rest were all matching on terms like "general", "generally" and "generated".
I understand the intent of fuzzy search and can see how it's picked up those terms, but for our users, it's creating noise more than being helpful.
3
Jarl Frode Arntzen
We have the same issue here as well as an related issue.
If our customers search for the word "workflow" we get maybe 10 results while if they search for "workflow group" you would expect them to get fewer results where all must contain both words but instead we get 28 results where the articles contain just one of the words. So the search do not work with an implicit AND operator between the search words but instead use implicit OR.
Effectively, this yields our documentation kinda useless and we're currently looking for alternatives to Zendesk Guide.
Please advice.
3
Laura Mayer-Sommer
How far does stemming go? Is it pretty much limited to standard prefixes/suffixes (de-, re-, un-, -ing, -ed) or will things like info/information and config/configuration match?
0
Meghan
Was there a recent update to this (like today?), search results are pulling in articles without the keyword and seem to have flipped the sort order we were seeing yesterday and it's causing some mayhem. How can we fix this?
1
Alex Ruano
We are also seeing this drastic shift in how search results are being sorted. This appears to have started today for us as well. Our teams are reporting articles that are normally at the top of search results being buried into page two or three of the results rather than the top few choices. The search tool seems to be pulling in articles that are not associated with (or very loosely associated with) the search terms being entered by our team members. It is as though the search tool is ignoring tags and article titles when sorting results. It is causing a lot of inconvenience for our team and our regular use of our Knowledge Base. Was there any recent changes (starting today/last night) and is there anything that can be done to resolve this issue?
0
Nicky Clark
Yes, we're also seeing this issue today, which renders the search effectively useless. A search for 'Teams' returns our article titled 'Teams' (and which contains the term team or teams forty-three times) on the second page 🙈
Edit: I've contacted Zendesk support directly and they've confirmed this is related to a known incident their devs are working on.
0
Nicolas P.
Hey Patrick Morgan! Sorry for the late reply to your message.
I got in touch with our content team about your comment. They confirmed that it was a mistake and they deleted the phrase.
Thank you for pointing that out!
0
Hannah Lucid
Hello,
Is there a way to turn off the Article Voting?
0
Amy Gracer
Hannah Lucid
You can hide the voting feature on the articles page.
Comment out this section
1
Raphaël Péguet - Officers.fr
Hi!
This is so hard to find (and I saw the documentation) the right way to write the url to get via API results for a certain query !
You write: "The only mandatory parameter is
filter[locales]
. Other parameters can be added to narrow down the search result set." but theres 0 example :/+ the flow builder api call maker doesn't accept "[":
0
Chantal Marti
Hi Jennifer! Thanks for sharing this info, it's very useful! We'd like to know a bit more about the Fuzzy search though. We've tested it on our English Help Centre, and it doesn't seem to work. E.g. If we search for “camcellation” in our external Help Centre, we get no results (0 articles), even though, the system should actually search for "cancellation" and get some related results. Do you know if this feature is actually working? If so, for what languages? Is there a way to activate it? Thanks!
2
Liam Jones
I also wish the Help Center search was a lot more like Google.
Why would an article with "topic planner" in the title not show up when I search "topic planner"?
It does on the second click of the search with no change to the text.
I'm often demonstrating to end users how to find our resources and then look foolish when it doesn't show up. I now say to them not to search for too long, just reach to us and out ask. This costs us the extra capacity required to support them as well as harming our reputation. We provide a user-friendly interface in our own software which is let down by poor search functionality when looking for our knowledge base articles.
Do you have any plans to improve the Help Center search? And if not, can I implore you to reconsider?
Thanks
4
Nicole Saunders
Hi everyone -
Just a reminder that product managers do not typically see product feedback posted in the comments on knowledge base articles. If you'd like your product feedback and feature requests to get noted and responded to by the product teams, please post it in the Guide Feedback Topic in the community. This is the official intake for customer feedback, and where PMs will typically respond and engage. Thanks!
0
Nicky Clark
It looks like this would be a good community post to vote and comment on - https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/5196533912218-Allow-admin-to-prevent-certain-fuzzy-search-matches
0
Joshua Bentley
I want to look for articles that contains a specific phrase, not any of the words within that phrase. For example, we are changing our corporate domain so I need to find any article with the old domain. But since our company name is in the domain, any article that has our company name in it shows up in the search results.
Based on what I'm reading here, am I right in understanding that because of fuzzy logic, if I search "companyname.com" I will get results for articles that don't contain that specific phrase?
0
Elizabeth Brown
Hi Zendesk team,
In your relevance scores: does Section title refer to the ZD structure of Category > Section > Article?
OR
does it refer to a heading within an article?
Google appears to pick up headings to display them in search results, which is helpful. I'd like to know if I need to spend more time working on ZD section titles, or on article headings?
Can you clarify please?
https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408894061338-About-Help-Center-end-user-search#h_88432433111547663753531
Cheers
E.A. Brown
1
Daniel
Hello!
I was wondering if anyone could provide me with information on how to proactively affect the search results given a specific type of input.
Context:
Looking at the "Searches with no results (Top 5)" section of the a Help Center dashboard, I noticed that there a number of people who are entering their order numbers into the search field.
Often this is an attempt at finding tracking info about their order.
If there were any way to provide, say, articles with a certain label (probably "tracking" in this case) or treat number entries as searched for "Tracking" or "Where is my order" if someone types in a number into the search field that would be great.
1
Rachel Nix
Hi, the zendesk search is very bad. For example, when I search the term "Bill" in the help center search bar, the suggested search populates relevant articles when I am typing, but then once I press enter, the actual search yields very irrelevant results, most of which do not even have the term "Bill" in the title.
What gives? This has happened repeatedly to several people, and I can only assume, to dozens of customers. A bad search negates the point of a self-serve help-center. Please advise.
2
Paolo
You can add labels to your articles to improve the search relevance. This article will provide the guide on how to implement it: Using labels on your help center articles. I highly recommend check the best practices part as well.
For more information about what influences search results in the help center, see About help center end user search.
Best,
Paolo | Technical Support Engineer | Zendesk
0
Thyago Guilherme
Hi all, can someone from Zendesl please confirm what were the last updates in the article?
Was the table below changed?
We are receiving complaints about the search results for articles in the Zendesk Guide, the results recently are not sorted like they used to be.
Sometimes articles without labels are put in front of the articles with labels after we search by the specific words.
2
Paul Moran
We'd like to add an Internal Only section to some of the Articles but, currently, anything in that section of the article will also be indexed.
Would be nice if there was a way of specify that certain text should not be indexed by Zendesk. Failing that, maybe another field on the article form that's not indexed by Zendesk.
1
olga.guryanova
As in the comment above, I also noticed as if the logic has changed. Like, labels for instance, don't seem to play such a huge role anymore. Whilst the length of the title seems to contribute the most!
Can you maybe double-check and update the scores?
1
Alexandra Charrier
Hi,
Someone here mentionned it is possible to use labels in order to backlist an article so it doesn't appear in the search results.
In our knowledge base we have articles that are still availble and readable but are about a decomissionned feature. Therefore I would like for these not to show up directly on search.
Does anyone know what kind of label I can use for this ? Or any other way to do this ?
0
Kidam Mun
I spent some time working through the limitations of labels and, although not the most elegant solution, I found a method that works well. I’m sharing it here for others who may be facing similar issues.
The approach involves manually boosting the search ranking by adding hidden, repetitive sentences to the document. For example, if you want a page to rank higher when searching for the term “scan depth,” you can add the following hidden sentence multiple times at the end of the source code.
After adding this hidden sentence about 30 times, the page consistently appeared at the top of search results for “scan depth.”
Hope Zendesk provides a more elegant solution in the future.
1
Summer Polacek
I'm curious if the current table ranking and scores it correct. I read in the Understanding help center search methods article that the Instant search, which is the default search method, does not search body text or labels of articles. See snippet below.
So do labels help and get ranked in the user searches, yes or no?
Instant search:
0
Jennifer Rowe
Hi Summer Polacek,
Instant search is the search method used only while the user is typing in the search box. That search method uses titles only, not body text or labels.
As soon as a user types a search term and presses Return/Enter, then native Help Center search is used. That search method includes titles, body text, and labels.
0