Some help center searches produce fewer results than other searches for the same term

Issue symptoms

When searching the help center using the same term, one of the following occurs:

• Search results are identical.
• Some searches are returning more or fewer results than others.
• Searches are performed from different help center pages. For example, a home page search differs from an article page.

Conditions

• Native help center search is being used and not a third-party service.

Resolution steps

The reason for this result count discrepancy is the {{search}} helper for articles, topics, and post templates has a scoped parameter by default. This scopes the search to just that particular topic or category. 

To disable this scoping functionality, you can remove the scoped-settings.scoped_kb_search operator from the template. The results left should be {{search submit=false}}.

If you would like to read more about how the {{search}} helper functions, check out the documentation.