The search facilities within your community, allow your members to find specific content that they are looking for on the site, using words and other known criteria.
A simple search can be achieved by typing into the bar on the top right of the site. When selecting the box, you will see there are options appear which will allow you to change what criteria you are using.
Options for search
Selecting search icon (magnifying glass) with no search criteria entered, will take you to the advanced search screen so you can select to filter by other criteria, such as by author, searching through tags, and many other criteria including custom fields you have set in your applications.
Advanced Search
Basic Settings
You can find all of the admin settings related to search within the following location
System -> Content Discovery -> Search
From here you can change the type of search and the way in which searches are processed by the system. By default search is set to MySQL. You should leave your system set to this default unless you are comfortable in setting up advanced server functionality on your hosting. For most people MySQL search will be sufficient.
MySQL Search Options
In the top right, you will also see a button to rebuild your search index. This can be used if you find any issues with search, you change any settings which require a rebuild, or any other reason you may wish to rebuild the indexing of the search itself.
When switching to elasticsearch you will need to enter the details relating to your elastic search server. If your hosting company has set this up for you, then you will need to obtain the address for this, along with the index name that has been used. These will then need to be entered this into the fields provided.
Elasticsearch Settings
Additional options such as time decay and author boost settings can also be set when using elastic search. These should be left at their default settings, if you are unaware of what to set these too, or you are informed of what values to use by your elasticsearch service provider.
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