How search works

Have the ability to ‘Search’ for and find the information you are looking for with ease from content to people.

Here’s a simple guide on how our search function works, helping you understand how you get your results when you use it within our product.

Understanding search results

When you enter a term in the search box, each result is ranked based on its relevance. This “relevance score” is determined by:

• Frequency of Search Term: The more times your search term appears in a result, the higher the relevance score will be.
• Exactness of Match: Results that exactly match your search term will score higher than those that only partially match.

Fuzziness in search

Our search has a “fuzziness” feature to help you find results even if there’s a slight misspelling or variation in your search term:

• For terms with less than 2 characters, the search needs an exact match.
• For terms with 3 to 5 characters, results can vary by one character (e.g., “Blog” could find “Blob”).
• For terms longer than 5 characters, results can vary by two characters (e.g., “Review” could match with “Renew”).

Prioritizing fields: Boosting

You can specify which parts of the content to search in—like titles, descriptions, or summaries. You can also “boost” how important each field is:

• Single Field: You might choose to search only in the title field.
• Multiple Fields: You can search in several fields at once and set priorities. For example, matches in the title field could be made more important than those in the summary or description.

Example of how search works

Imagine you have two items:

1. ID: 1, Title: “Blog”
2. ID: 2, Title: “Blob”

If you search for “Blog” specifically in the title field, here’s what happens:

• ID: 1 (“Blog”) will appear first because it’s an exact match.
• ID: 2 (“Blob”) also appears due to fuzziness but is ranked lower because it’s not an exact match.

Searching by email address

When searching for a user by email, use the ‘People’ filter to see the most relevant user profiles. For example, searching for “dorothy.whitehead@akagera.com” with the ‘People’ filter will directly show Dorothy’s profile.

We hope this guide makes your search experience smoother and more efficient! If you have any questions, feel free to reach out for support.