Improving Search Engine Parameters

[joshkinn]

Hello!

I am a moderator on the PowerSchool Community (https://help.powerschool.com/). If you search for an article, i.e. 'adding items to an exam,' you get the video and the article that most people would want. But, if you search 'add items to an exam' though, which is a very likely wording, you don't get the article in the results at all. It sounds to me like there is an issue with not including words that contain the search term (for example, typing in 'add' doesn't search for terms that contain 'adding', etc.). Is this a limitation of the Lithium search engine, or is there something we can do on our end to expand the search parameter so it captures better search results?

Best,

Josh

[Wendy_S]

Hi!

Lithium has several options to improve search relevancy.

First, do you have auto suggest turned on? It will provide search suggestions as users type their search.

https://lithosphere.lithium.com/t5/Search-tools/Set-search-options/ta-p/108623

can read about in this release  note article here

It explains the spellcheck options, how to add words to custom dictionary and how to enable combinatorial search.

Combinatorial search might be the one to help you out here.

Combinatorial search

Lithium Community now supports combinatorial search. When combinatorial search is enabled and a user enters a multi-term search string, various combinations of the individual terms are used to conduct the search to generate the search results. Previously, all terms in the string needed to be matched before a result was shown. Now the search uses a fuzzier heuristic.

The search settings can be set by administrators in the search admin however the items mentioned in the release notes need to be tweaked from the back-end, through a support ticket.

Hope this helps you a bit.

Wendy