About help center end user search

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49 Comments

  • Soo Hian Foo

    Hi, can we only set the search to find Help Center articles and not community topics/posts?

    Is there a setting for this? Thank you!

    0
  • Amy Gracer
    Community Moderator

    You probably have scoped to KB enabled. See this section

    Scoped search in Knowledge base

    This might also help.

    search helper

    {{search}}

    Inserts a search box.

    Parameters

    None.

    Attributes
    • scoped (optional, boolean) If scoped is true and the helper is on the category, section, or article page, searches only the articles in the current category. If the helper is on the topic or post page, searches only the posts in the current topic. Default is false.
    • submit (optional, boolean) If true, render the submit button. Default is false.
    • instant (optional, boolean) If true, enables Instant Search to provide HC article suggestions while you type in the search box. Instant Search article suggestions do not respect the scoped parameter if it is set.
    • class (optional, string) class name to be added to the form
    • placeholder (optional, string) placeholder value for the search input element
    Availability
    • All pages
    Example
    {{search}}
    
    Output

    If inserted in the Home page:

    <section class="search-box">
      <form accept-charset="UTF-8" action="/hc/en-us/search" class="search" method="get" role="search">
        <div style="display:none"><input name="utf8" type="hidden" value="&#x2713;" /></div>
        <input id="query" name="query" placeholder="Search" type="search" />
        <input name="commit" type="submit" value="Search" />
      </form>
    </section>
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  • Dave Dyson

    Hi Karolina,

    Not directly, but you can use the Help Center API to get search results in JSON format: Help Center API – Search

    0
  • Rahul Singh

    Hi, 

    Is there a way to configure null search default text? currently there's a 'contact us' redirection for a null search result, which I want to remove.

    0
  • Tipene Hughes
    Zendesk Developer Advocacy
    Hey Rahul,
     
    Thanks for reaching out!
     
    You can customize what appears on the page when no search results are returned by updating the code in the search_results.hbs file. For example, using the default Copenhagen theme you’d need to update the final {{else}} statement in the search_results.hbs file. Below is how the code appears by default:
     
    {{else}}
          <p>
            {{t 'no_results_unified'}}
            {{#link 'help_center'}}
              {{t 'browse_help_center'}}
            {{/link}}
          </p>
     
    Which appears on the search results page as:
     
     

    Here’s a link with more information on the different helpers available to you when customizing the code: 
    I hope this helps! Feel free to reach out with any questions.
     
    Tipene
    0
  • Zach Brown

    What would be the recommended best practice re: search result indexing for articles that are meant to appear in a series? For example, I've written a 7 article series on a topic, but due to the weighting of the relevance algorithm, articles 5 through 7 appear at the top of the search results when that topic is searched (see screenshot).


    I've artificially tweaked the sequence of the articles that appear on search by up-voting and applying labels to articles 1 through 4, so the articles appear in the correct sequence on search, but I know this is only a temporary solution. Once end users start voting on these articles themselves, the sequence in which they appear on search will change.

    It would be really helpful if I could circumvent the algorithm and pin article 1 to appear as the top search result when the topic is searched (since article 1 links out to the others in the series in the correct order). But if there are any other suggestions on a way to achieve this with current functionality I'm all ears!

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  • Nikki

    Zach Brown I don't know if you'll like this suggestion, but the first idea that came to my mind was to use labels to make the later articles blacklisted to never show. Then your first articles will be the ones to come up. It just depends if there are ever cases where your later articles will have matches and you want them to be returned even if the first articles are not.

     

    Also Jennifer Rowe , either my brain is missing something or this sentence has a typo:

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

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  • Jennifer Rowe
    Zendesk Documentation Team

    Hi Nikki, thanks for pointing that out!

    The typo is that there is no typo and there should be. It was originally written as "user segmemt" to show that despite the typo, the search engine displays the correct results for "user segment," but someone corrected the typo, so it didn't make any sense. I've fixed it! Thanks!

    2
  • Zach Brown

    Thanks Nikki! I didn't realize labels could be used to prevent articles from showing up on search. I'll take it under consideration.

    0
  • Lauren Mulkern

    How exactly does stemming work? Does the search iterate for a set of suffixes, or is it a wildcard?

    Our content covers topics where users will search for part of a proper noun - example: "Sugar" vs "SugarCRM". If we're applying labels for SEO improvements, do we need to apply both labels, or will stemming find a "sugar" label when the user searches for SugarCRM, or vice versa?

    Thanks!

    0
  • matthew newman

    Hello, I hope you can help with a question we have on how to make sure one search result appears above a second search result. Please see screenshot below. We want to reverse the order of the two responses shown in the screenshot. We want the Zendesk response about US leaves (see red arrow) to appear before the leavesresponse excluding the US. Based on the relevance score factors, would it be most effective to change the knowledge article title for the US response to say "Leave of absence for United States employees" to create a stronger link when users type in "Leave of absence"? Should we add more labels in the US article to include the term "Leave of absence"? Should we add article votes to boost the relevance? It is important that US article comes before OUS article because the leave policies are different for each group. We need to include both knowledge articles in the search, but we really want US to appear first in search results. Thanks for any suggestions you can provide.

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  • Kyle Johnson

    We've had issues with our users (and even myself) getting completely different search results when we first hit the "search" button, compared to if you just click the "search" button a second time. The first list of results actually don't have anything relevant to what was searched for. Very strange and it's causing a dramatic decrease in the confidence of our users when trying to find the information they need. 

    Example:

    I search "Field Day" to get to one of the dozens of articles that have this right in the title of the article. These are the results I got the first time:

    (Nothing titled "Field Day", and only 27 results)

    Then I simply click the Search button again (not even changing any of the text), and I get this completely different set of search results, which is actually the correct set of results:

    (149 results, and everything is titled Field Day)

    1
  • Gustavo Oliveira
    Zendesk Customer Care
    Hi Kyle,
     
    I've reached out to you through a private ticket, so we can further investigate it.
    0
  • Jarl Frode Arntzen

    Hi, Zendesk.

    We now have close to 200 different help articles for various parts of our appilcation. It has recently become more and more difficult to find the correct article and it took us a while to realize that adding more words to the search term does not narrow the search results.

    In our system searching for bank yields 6 results while searching for bank account yields 64 (!) results. As we're only half way through documenting our system, this problem will only increase.

    Is there a way to switch on the "find multiple words" search variant as default?

    Thanks.

    1
  • Jeff S.

    Hi,

    I have the same question as a user from a year ago. I would like to remove Community posts from the default Search behavior in the Copenhagen theme we use. Our Community content is not a robust or directed as our Help Center content and can just include a lot of 'chatter' among our users.

    I have tried all variations of 'Scoped Search' in the options to no avail. Is it possible via Search helpers? 

    Failing that, can we automatically select Guide content on the search results page and not 'all categories' which requires a user to select out of Community content?

    Thanks.

    1
  • Dane
    Zendesk Engineering

    Jeff S.

    Due to the nature of your concern, I have created a ticket for you. Please wait for an update via email from one of our Support Advocate.

    0
  • Xin

    We have close to 2500 articles on help center. We found that we keep getting "wrong words" being triggered in the search. For example, a query from Answer Bot:

    "Some of my users are having problem with schedules. Since Monday morning, I have a lot of failed schedules, expecially for two users, with no error messages. What could we do"

    The returned articles are completely irrelevant to "schedule", instead these are the words seems to be used for ranking the search:

    • with
    • of
    • are
    • users
    • schedule
    • Monday morning

    We have labeled most of our articles. How can we avoid having "with", "of" and "are" such words getting involved in the search rank?

    0
  • Kyle Johnson

    Xin we experienced something similar where users were treating our search bar like Google and typing full sentences and sometimes paragraphs, which made the search results pretty useless. One thing we did was change the prompted text in the search bar from something like "How can we help?" to "Keyword search" to guide them in how we want them to perform their search. Idk if that would help in your context but it seems to have changed the kind of searches our users make.

    0
  • Xin

    Thanks Kyle Johnson! Just wondering how did you change the prompted text? I'm not sure I see the relevant documentation

     

    0
  • Kyle Johnson

    Xin that is a great question, which I am unfit to answer because our developers did it. We have a custom theme. 

    0
  • Xin

    Kyle Johnson Gotcha, thanks so much!

    0
  • Jeff S.

    Dane thanks, but I never did receive a follow-up email about this issue.

    0
  • Dane
    Zendesk Engineering

    Jeff S.,

    No worries, I'll personally take care of it. Please wait for my update.

    0
  • Davis Lundberg

    Looking for code help to add another filter criteria to the side bar on the "Search Results Page"

    This way it will list sub selections such as Labels instead of just By Category/products. 

     

    1
  • Eric Nelson
    Zendesk Developer Advocacy
    Hey Davis,

    This can be found in our templating cookbook.

    Thanks!
    0
  • John DiGregorio

    Hello,

    We are in the process of consolidating two brands into one.  However, some customers still refer to their previous brand.   On the knowledge search is there a way to remove the name from the subsection - please see image below

     

    0
  • Dave Dyson
    Hi John -
     
    You can hide this link by editing the your theme code, adding the following to the bottom of style.css:
     
    /* hide the help center brand link in the search result items breadcrumbs */
    .search-result-breadcrumbs > li:first-child{display:none};
     
    For more information, see Customizing the CSS or JavaScript
     
    This won't hide the '>' between the brand name link and the category; I'm not sure how to do that, but maybe someone in the community might have an idea, if you want to pursue that as well.
    0
  • John DiGregorio

    Dave - thank you very much - this is exactly what I wanted...     

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  • Dave Dyson
    Awesome, John – glad I could help!
    0
  • Patrick Morgan

    Just to clarify the following section:

    These items are not included in the search...

    • Headings - Any text with a heading format applied to it does not appear in Help Center search.

    Is this saying that the snippet shown in search won't include content in Headings? Presumably the search does crawl and index Headings, correct?

    I'm thinking specifically in an FAQ page use case where you might have a number of FAQs collected on a single page (each using a Heading on the page) rather than split across multiple articles. This would improve the user's browsing experience in finding answers about a specific product/feature/etc... they'd just go the that page to find an answer from the various FAQ. When related FAQs get their own articles, it increases the amount of clicking and browsing a user has to do. Surfacing Heading content in those snippets could help indicate that an answer appears in an article, even if their question isn't in the Title.

    Additionally, I'm curious to know why Headings are not given any special weight in Help Center search. When optimizing for Google (which we also want to do with our help center), Headers are really important to indicate what the page is about and to help Google determine relevance and fulfill search intent.

    4

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