Search settings

Change Search settings in the admin panel

This page explains settings that can be changed using the Admin panel: Search section > Search settings page.

These include:

• The number of search results that display on the main search page and People or Group Directories
• The number of results that display on forum pages or the main polls page
• The number of news items that display on News pages
• The number of search filter facets that display
• Page types that will be excluded from search results
• The number of Best Bets that will display
• The number of Suggestions that will display
• Words that will be excluded from search terms
• Pages that will be excluded from search results
• Other advanced search settings

Index

If you encounter problems with search functionality, the actions on this page may help you to resolve the problem. To learn more, see Search Index.

Page Sizes

These values determine the number of results that will display on a page at once. If the number of results is greater than the set value, the results will display on multiple pages that users can navigate between. This value can be any number you like, but a maximum of 100 is suggested to maintain good performance.

The settings apply to the following:

• General: Main search page results
• Forum: List of forum posts on forum pages
• Groups: Groups Directory search results
• News Blog: News posts using Blog display
• News Grid: News posts using Grid display
• News List: News posts using List display
• People: People/Employee Directory search results
• Polls: List of polls on main poll page

To change a page size setting, click in the corresponding box, type in the new value and click Save beside the box.

Example:
A search for "pacific" yielded 117 results. Because the Main search page size is set to twenty, only twenty results display on the page at once.

Page numbers at the bottom allow users to navigate between the 117 search results.

Facets

These settings control the number of search facets that appear for each filter type in the filter card. If there are more facets than the set number, a search box will appear at the end of each type of facet to allow users to search for facets that are not listed.

In this example, the Edited by filter type is set to five facets.

To learn more, see Configure tag display on search.

Page Types

Select the checkbox beside page types that you want to be excluded from general search results.

Best Bets

This setting determines the maximum number of Best Bets that will display on a search, as configured on the Admin panel: Search section > Best Bets page. To learn more, see How to use Best Bets.

A search for "new employee" returns a search result recommendation for new hires

Functions

Although a brief description of this section is provided, we strongly recommend contacting ThoughtFarmer Support for more information before making any changes to these settings.

Calendar events

Events in the past have decreased relevance - the older it is the less relevant it is. ThoughtFarmer uses a Gaussian date decay function for calendar event decay. The Decay rate affects how quickly the score decays (per interval). The Decay scale controls the decay interval.

Page type

Certain page types have their scores adjusted by these values - think of it as a multiplier.

Popularity

Weight controls how much of an effect popularity has on page relevance - think of it as a multiplier.

Suggestions

This setting has to do with the Did you mean? feature of search which suggests other words if it thinks a user has misspelled their search term.

Number to show determines the number of suggestions that will display when Search+ thinks that a user has misspelled the search term. Max score means suggestions will only be shown when the max score of the search results returned is below this value. If you want suggestions to show more frequently, make the value higher; if you want suggestions less frequently, make the number lower.

Stopwords

This is a list of words that will be ignored if they are included in search queries. By default, such common words as and, but, and to are ignored. Administrators can add or delete stopwords for each enabled language on the intranet.

Exclusions

Add pages to this list to exclude them (and any subpages) from the main site-wide search.

Exclude accounts from employee directory

Specific user accounts can be excluded from employee directory results by changing the config setting search.employeeDirectory.exclude.profileIds. For example, this can be used to hide the ThoughtFarmer support/vendor account from appearing in the employee directory. To exclude a user account from the employee directory, add a comma-separated list of the profile IDs (content IDs of the user's profile pages, not user IDs) for the user accounts that you want to exclude, to the value column of the config setting mentioned above.

1. Find the content IDs for the user accounts that you want to exclude from the employee directory. The content ID is the number contained in the URL for the user's profile page. It is not the user ID. 
   • eg. https://intranet.thoughtfarmer.com/123456/user-name
2. Go to the Admin panel: Advanced section > Configuration settings page.
3. Type employee in the Search config settings field to narrow the config settings results.
4. Find the config setting:
   

   search.employeeDirectory.exclude.profileIds

5. Click in the Value column beside the config setting. Enter a comma-separated list of the content IDs for the user accounts you want to exclude.
6. Click Save.