KB User's Guide - General Info - Live Search Results Screen and Its Features
Performing a Search on a KB Site
To find a document, enter one or more keywords in the Search field. When a user submits a query:
- The KB searches for all documents that contain those specific keywords.
- The Case of keywords is ignored.
- Document keywords are specified by the document owner when the document is created.
- Document titles are also considered keywords and searched during the query process.
- The default sort order for search results is based on its relevance to the Default Search Mode assigned by the KB Admin. Relevance is determined by the similarity between the search term itself and the Default Search Option.
Narrowing your Search Further
If you find that there are too many documents to choose from during your initial search, try one of the 4 search strategies below.
| Search Strategy | Description |
|---|---|
| Limiting Results | If searching using a single word yields too many unrelated documents, try adding another word or two. You may also use the drop-down menu to limit your search to one specific topic. If you do not see a drop down menu for a topics, please ask your KB Admin to enable it. |
| Exact Match | If you are looking for an exact match, try using a phrase and enclose the phrase in quotation marks. |
| Excluding Documents | If you want to exclude documents that contain a certain keyword, you can focus your search by putting a minus sign ("-") in front of that word. For example, classlist -learn will find classlist documents that are not related to Learn@UW. |
| Advanced Search | If standard search doesn't help, try our Advanced Search, which allows you to further tailor your query parameters to your needs. If the Advanced Search button is not enabled on your KB Site, ask your Admin to enable it. |
| Searching for numerals | If searching for a numeral, type the letter "a" and then type the numeral (e.g. a 2018). The additional "a" tells the KB that the search is not for a specific document, instead, it tells the KB to search for documents that contains what’s after the letter "a" because the letter "a" is a noise word/letter and subsequently ignored in the search. |
The KB Search Results Page and the Additional Search Options
After performing a Search you will see a table with your Search Results. In the image below, we have the Search Results for "Profile" in the KB User's Guide. This image has the Additional Search Features circled in red. We will review each one.
Search Priority as Delineated by Asterisks
At the top of your search, you may find document titles with gold asterisks next to them. Four asterisks denote that the document Search Priority is set to Top. Three asterisks denote that the document's search priority was set to High.
Show Relevant Topic Filters
A the top right of the Search Results screen, you will find this link. After a user enters a search term, clicking on this link will display in which topics the results of the search can be found. The number of documents in each topic can be found inside the parentheses.
Keywords dropdown box
The Search Results page also has a dropdown menu on the top left of the screen. You may modify your search further by selecting one of these options from the dropdown menu. The Default Search mode is determined by your KB Admin.
- Keywords+Title
- Fulltext search
- Attachments search
- Keywords+attachments search
- Fulltext + attachment search
Sort by Relevance link
The Sort by Relevance link resets the document sequence of your results if you choose to sort by the table Attributes; Document Title, ID, Updated and Hits. The image below has a red circle around the table attributes that can sort the table.
The actual Relevance looks at a variety of factors and weights them accordingly:
- Search Priority -Documents with the highest priority will be weighted most.
- Group who owns the Document - If your KB group owns the document, that will factor will be weighted more than documents shared in from other KB groups.
- How Recently the Doc was Updated - a more recent update date will be weighted more than a doc that has not been updated in a while.
- Number of Hits - a document with more hits is weighted more than a doc with fewer hits
- OS Detection - Depending what the OS detection default is on your KB Site, you may or may not have your search results weighted by OS.
RSS: XML, JSON, OL Options
Clicking on these fields (on the upper right corner of the table of documents) will yield a screen with the output of your search. The limit for the dynamic feed is 1500. When you perform a search on your KB site, the dynamic search results can be accessed as an RSS feed. This is useful for groups that would like to consume KB content within another web site or web application. Please see KB User's Guide - General Info - XML (RSS) Display Options for more information.
"See UW-Madison Unified KnowledgeBase" link
Clicking on this link will take you to the KB Unified site where you will find relevant documents on other KB external sites. The number next to the link denotes how many relevant documents are available to you on the Unified site.
"1 2 3...Next" linked numbers
These are the pagination controls (some people refer to it as the table of contents or TOC) that lets the user browse through pages of search results. in the image below, the pagination is 1, 2, 3, 4 and then Next. In the image below, the pagination is circled in red.
Search partner public sites/ Relevant documents from partner public sites
Upon entering your search criteria, the KB compiles a list of documents relevant to your search and displays the first five documents with a link leading you to the rest. In the image above, there are 17 potentially relevant documents from partner public sites. The link below the 5 linked documents leads to 17 more documents.