Search
Note
|
|---|
|
This section describes Search in BWA version 10.0.2.30 and later. Earlier versions differ in both the screens and the options available. |
BWA includes a full-text search engine that indexes your live website and serves results back to visitors. Search is configured entirely from the administration area — there is no separate search product to install or manage.
Search operates per domain and per language. Each domain in your BWA installation keeps its own index, and within that domain each active language keeps its own index as well. Configuring search for one domain has no effect on any other.
The engine underneath is Keyoti SearchUnit, included as part of BWA and wrapped behind the administration screens described here. How Search Works covers what that means in practice.
What Search Does
Rather than reading your content out of the database, BWA Search visits your website the same way a visitor would. It walks the site from the home page, follows links, renders each page, and records the words it finds. That indexed text is what visitor searches are matched against.
Indexing the rendered site rather than the raw content has a practical consequence worth understanding up front: what gets indexed is what is publicly visible. Content hidden behind a login, pages excluded from navigation and never linked, or text injected by client-side script after the page settles may not appear in the index. The configuration screen gives you tools to handle each of these cases.
- Indexes HTML pages and, where supported, documents such as Microsoft Office files and PDFs
- Understands word variants, so a search for "running" can match "run"
- Supports phrase searches, wildcards, and AND / OR / NOT expressions
- Lets you weight parts of a page so more important content ranks higher
- Lets you tag indexed pages into categories so results can be filtered
- Reports back on what it indexed, what redirected, and what returned "not found"
Feature Availability by Edition
Some search features are gated by your BWA edition. The configuration screen shows a notice in place of any feature your licence does not include.
|
Feature |
Required edition |
|---|---|
|
General settings, Content Categories, Link path exclusions, Logs, Word Lists, Results |
All editions |
|
Location Categories, Security Categories, HTTP Headers, HTTP Cookies |
Professional or Enterprise |
|
External Domain linking, custom Search Index DLL |
Enterprise |
Where to Start
If you are setting search up for the first time, work through the topics in order. How Search Works explains the indexing cycle, and Enabling Search and Building the Index gets you to a working index. Once that is working, Scheduled and Command-Line Indexing covers keeping it up to date without anyone having to remember. The remaining topics cover tuning.
The Search configuration screen sits with the other domain-level configuration settings. Because search is configured per domain and per language, make sure you have the domain and language you intend to configure selected before you open it.
Navigate to Domain Management -> Configuration Settings -> System -> Search Configuration