It is now increasingly popular to be able to search for static content such as SEO metadata and articles on a selling site. For example, you can make searchable how products are used, through articles, blogs, videos and pictures. We have widened our search functionality to not only search for products, but also static content, such as articles, videos, or images. Your customers can search for a specific product as well as additional content, such as marketing material, assembly videos, or feature articles on product care. A search for “delivery” may return results related to lead times or cost. A customer could search for firmware files to upgrade the smart device they purchased from you.
How does it work?
When 'Static Content Search' is included, the search engine will index publicly accessible page content for the Search facility.
Step-by-step guide
Follow these steps to configure the article content search functionality for your site:
1. We need to turn on Content Search first: in your CMS, go to Settings → Feature Management → Content
2. Locate Content Search and click Configure.
3. Turn on Enable Content Search Feature.
4. Set the schedule to a few minutes in the future, and click Save and Exit.
5. Select Advanced Settings from the CMS side-menu.
6. Select Lucene Search Settings.
7. Select the Index Settings tab.
8. Tick the checkbox to enable indexing.
9. While you're there, let's enable Partial Word Searches. You do that by ticking Perform Partial Word Searches and selecting the Search Type: Scoring Boolean Query, Constant Score Query, and Matching Terms.
10. Click Update to save your settings.
11. Click the Indexing tab.
12. Click the "Reindex Page Content" button to initiate an index of the content on all pages.
13. The progress bar will display the progression of the reindexing.
14. Once complete, the Reindex process displays the time taken to index your site's pages.
Now, we need to reconfigure the existing Product Search widget to search for content other than products.
15. Go to Content → Page & Templates → Theme Layout.
16. Click the Theme Layout option.
17. Locate the Product Search widget and click Edit. In our example, the Product Search widget is under Zone:HeaderColumn2.
18. You should now see a new field Static Content Search. Select Include Static Content Search from the drop-down list. This feature will expand your customers' search capabilities.
19. Click on the Titles tab, where you can change the search results headings.
20. Select Save, and if you have your site set to Page Preview, then Publish the changes.
21. You can customise the zero results returned message in the new Page Content Search Result Template. You can locate that template via Content → Page & Templates → Other Page & Templates.
22. Click to Edit the new Page Content Search Result widget.
23. Open the Notification tab and type in your new message. Click Save, and if you have your site set to Page Preview, then Publish your changes.
24. Go to Content → Page & Templates → Products → Product List.
25. The Product List Title widget should be at the top of the Product List page. Click to Edit.
26. This widget will now display a new field on the General Options tab: Static Web Pages Found Message.
27. You can leave the message as the default, or alter it to reflect the language and tone of your site.
28. Click Save at the bottom of the page. If you have your site set to Page Preview, then select Publish from the top right-hand side of the page to propagate the changes to your site.
29. Perform a search to see what results are returned. You can see it uses the message from the Product List Title widget in the results display.
30. Or, if your search returns no results, ensure your "no results" message from the Product Search widget's notification tab (Step 22) displays.
31. If we click on the Search Suggestions message highlighted in red in the image from Step 29, the system will bring up a list of pages in our site that contain the keyword.
32. We can confirm we have those Articles in our system by navigating in CMS to Content → Articles. Click Edit.
33. We can see that we have three articles with our keyword "article" in their heading.
34. If we search for a partial word that is not in a title, the system will also return results.
35. If you hit return on the Search Suggestions instead of clicking the "n web pages found" message, then the system will return a list of web pages that contain the keyword and a list of products that match it.
In this example, 1 web page and no products match the keyword.
36. You can click on the web page results to display the static content.
37. If your keyword matches products and static content, then searching and pressing return will give the following results.
38. In our example, we have Product Suggestions turned on in the Product Search widget, so the product search returned product names that are spelled similarly to our keyword.
The static content search facility will allow your customers to search on content other than products. Explore the search results and tinker with the widgets detailed in this knowledge base article until you are confident with the results.
Additional Information
Make sure you enable Partial Word Search in your Lucene Search Indexing so your customers don't have to know the exact name of your static content to find it.
| Minimum Version Requirements | 4.14.00 |
|---|---|
| Prerequisites | Content other than Products and Categories |
| Self Configurable | Yes |
| Business Function | Searching |
| BPD Only? | Yes |
| B2B/B2C/Both | Both |
| Ballpark Hours From CV (if opting for CV to complete self config component) | Contact CV Support |
| Ballpark Hours From CV (in addition to any self config required) | Contact CV Support |
| Third Party Costs | N/A |
| CMS Category | Advanced Settings Lucene |
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