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Knowledge Capture: Ability to exclude articles from search results
Posted Jun 16, 2021
The Knowledge Capture app in Zendesk Support currently pulls in all published articles from a brand.
We would like the ability to exclude certain articles from the search results of the Knowledge Capture app. This could be done through the use of labels on the article level in Guide.
The reason this is important is that we utilize parts of our help center for non-knowledge/support related content (this content is in the same brand as our knowledge content in an effort to increase adoption and usage across our help center). Because of this, the non-support content shows up in the Knowledge App and, thus, affects a team's ability to find the relevant knowledge articles to resolve issues. For this reason, this non-support content should be able to be excluded so it does not show up in the Knowledge Capture app.
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25 comments
Jacob D
Ditto!
3
Rachel Montgomery
Agreed! Would love to see this functionality. Our use case is that we've documented our manual processes and host them in our help center, but they aren't particularly helpful for offering product support and our agents are misusing them. We're coaching against it but with our growth this will continue to pose a problem for us.
6
Don
Having the ability to exclude articles or all articles in a section from appearing in a search will be really helpful.
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CJ Johnson
This is the last piece of a technical puzzle I'm trying to solve. I would love to be able to do this.
1
Jeppe Skafte Johansen
Would be a very useful feature, I have a lot of material that I would like to be accessible only by link. Today I have to put it in a separate brand which makes it harder to maintain, and much harder for the user to navigate.
2
Trevor Bassett
Anyone find a solution for this yet?
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Michael Buckley
I too am interested in having this functionality built in to the interface. I think we might be able to go to Customise area (click eye icon on left), then edit current theme, and then edit code with a bunch of if-isnt-statements that say, if article isn't x, display in results? But this would be very time-consuming for large quantities of articles, messy and prone to errors. (I'm not 100% if this idea works, but hope this helps someone!)
I would personally love an option in the interface to exclude articles that have been assigned certain user segments and/or entire categories/sections.
1
Ryan Rawlings
This is a feature that would be very useful for the company I'm with also.
1
George Denison
Really would love to have this feature too!!
We've tried many suggested workarounds, custom code ideas, and even had one of our devs look into it, but nothing has worked. The last workaround we attempted was to add a "hide-search" label to specific guides and then add custom code to omit those labeled guides from search results and search autocomplete.
Ideally, if Zendesk could implement this as a feature, I see this as a checkbox in the Guide editor sidebar to "hide from search."
I've been searching for a solution for a long time, dug through posts dating back a few years, but earlier this year all of the old posts asking for this feature disappeared from the Community site. Happy to see this resurface and hope that a feature can be added or a working solution will be suggested.
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Michael Buckley
George Denison I love this idea as a workaround! But how are you identifying the articles with the "hide-search" in the labels? I'm looking through their docs and search result object doesn't have a label property. Objects | Zendesk Developer Docs
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Ronald
+1 for this!
The only way that I'm aware of that can allow excluding certain articles from a help center search is by using the label_names parameter: https://developer.zendesk.com/api-reference/help_center/help-center-api/search/#filtering-by-labels
But since you can only include results that have a label it's not terribly practical. There are a couple of things that make this workaround less than ideal:
This workaround, while somewhat annoying to implement, I think would work for external apps such as a chatbot when the request to the search endpoint could be customized to include the label_name parameter to filter the results returned to the chatbot or other external application.
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Don
+1
We tried a few different solutions. Not that many options other than deleting the miscellaneous and release note articles. Zendesk search hasn't been that great. You get better article suggestions within your own help center if you search on google than you would from Zendesk's built-in search 🤨.
Having the ability to choose which sections/categories should be excluded from the search can help us dramatically reduce the number of irrelevant articles. Especially considering the search in itself isn't that smart (the word can literally be in the title of the article and still show up on page 2).
1
Tetiana Gron
Hi everyone!
Knowledge in the Agent Workspace provides more flexibility to configure the search comparing to KC app. You can define default filters for the Knowledge search (e.g. sections, categories, and etc.). Please check Announcing Knowledge filters settings.
0
Duncan Hamra
I would also love to see this feature.
2
Don
Tetiana Gron - I don't believe that helps. We need the ability to block articles from a section from being searched altogether. Example, a release note section can pan out to 4 years worth of historic release notes. Adding labels to 100+ articles isn't feasible. Would just prefer to exclude articles from a section or category from appearing in the search.
We don't need to hide the articles from our clients, just block them from appearing in search.
1
Elizabeth Straub
For those of you using the "hide-search" labels, how are you identifying the articles?
Would you be able to provide a code example, please?
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Alyssa
Here to echo: Please allow us to have unlisted article pages! My company does product testing, and we need to be able to direct test users to help articles without the article being findable by non-testers.
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Michael Buckley
Just commenting to say I love Alyssa's idea! It would save us from having to explain to our pilot customers how to register and sign in to view an article. Instead, we could just give them a link.
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John
Ditto. Not just for KC app, please give us an option to exclude any articles from indexed by the Zendesk default search. This is important when we don't have multiple category filter for default search (we only have it for API but this currently don't support Semantic search).
Something like this...
4
Kristian Tungland
Would love to have a feature like this! This should be available. We have the same issue with release notes and updates not needed to be shown in the search results.
0
Erskine Wilson
I'd also like to see this implemented for the same purpose (release notes/archival material that is worth keeping but shouldn't appear in article search results).
My current solution to this is a custom page for release notes that's essentially a copy of an article page in terms of layout. This is very impractical though since I need to bury old release notes inside accordions to keep the page clean, and even then the html is not going to be great to work with after a while. If you only care about having the latest release notes published though, it works okay.
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Ashley M
+1 for this.
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Ed Fry
+1 it would be great to filter articles from Zendesk search results. Even if it was a case of adding a label to each article you don't want to show up in a search.
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Cat Coyne
+1 for this feature request. Would be great to have the ability to hide release note articles from our help centre search results.
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Erika Filiberto
Would be great to have the ability to hide select articles, sections, or categories from ZenDesk Search Results to better control who or which groups can find or access content (above and beyond what User Segments can do)
0