Manage Search Rules

In response to @xiaoyu-shen topic about search advance, I would like to share my thoughts here about the search bar.

User story:
As a customer I want to use the search bar, so that I can find an asnwer in the most relevant topic/article

Background:
Currently live search is not always showing the most valuable content in our Community. The search algoritm is based on specific ruling. See this topic for the ruling. If your strategy is a knowledge base, you need a good search bar.

Our problem is:
As community team we are not in control of our own content in the search bar.

The follow problems we see;

• Articles are often not shown in searchbar because it has no "best answer" (third most important ruling in the algortime).
  

As work around you can turn this topic to Question with a best answer. But this is not the ideal situation

• Archive topics are shown in search bar, but these topics are not relevant anymore, so you want to rule these out in the search bar.
  
• You are not in control which topics shown in the top results of live search. Now the top results (option 1, 2 or 3) are often the topics you dont want users to click on. Here you also want to be more in control.
  

Let me give you an example;
As is; If you look in the Ziggo Community for the subject "Port forwarding" the search bar shows;

But as community team you want to show THIS topic (according to the rules; right title, reply, tags, category etc) .But this one is not shown in live search and the reason is "no best answer".

Idea
In inspire community there has been the idea of @Jurgen to work with tags in the backend system. If you really want to be in control of the most used functionallity in your community, you need to implement this in your control environment under settings and make your own query's. See picture;

It starts with getting the right insights (keywords) that visitors are using in the search bar. This information you can also find in Google Analtycs, but it should be integrated in the control environment. It's a Must Have to set up the right guery rules, like;

If search query contains -keyword-, then show the -content link-

Another Must Have is, you should have the option to rule out a category (like archive) from the search bar.

Nice to have is that you are also in control on which position the topic is shown in search.

See for more information about manage query rules this website