Plan requirement
| Subscription | Suite Team or higher, Knowledge Professional or higher |
| Access | Admin |
The search settings decide what gets searched and how results are grouped. Two areas sit there, Search sources and Crawlers, and each source you add gets its own name in the Source filter your readers see.
Open them
- In Knowledge admin, click Settings in the sidebar.
- Click Search settings.
- Under Search sources, click Manage to choose what is included.
- Search for something you know the answer to, and see what comes back.
What can be included
| Community posts | Enabled as a search source per help centre. |
| Other help centres | Articles and posts from your other help centres. Needs Suite Enterprise with Knowledge Enterprise. |
| External sources | Available once federated search is set up, through a crawler or the API. |
Broader is not automatically better. A customer searching for an instruction is not helped by three forum threads appearing above the article.
Featured articles, before anybody searches
Under Featured articles you can pin up to six articles that appear as a drop-down the moment a reader clicks the search field, before they have typed anything. They stay until the third character, when instant results take over. Configure none and the drop-down does not appear at all.
It is the cheapest placement in the help centre: the questions you already know they have, offered before they phrase them. Click Manage to add them and drag to set the order.
The fifth area is the AI switch
Quick answers on this same page turns generative search on and off, and it is on by default on every plan. See Managing your generative search usage.
Community has to be enabled at both ends
To surface community posts from another help centre, community must be enabled as a search source in the help centre that holds the post, not only in the one doing the searching. Miss that and nothing appears, with no indication why.
The Source filter is what readers get
Results are grouped under their source names, and readers can filter by them. So the names you give your sources are customer-facing text: "Developer docs" reads as an answer, an internal system name reads as noise.
Language
Readers see content in their own language, so a language that is enabled but barely translated gives its readers thin results and no explanation. That reads as the help centre being empty rather than untranslated, which is why translating the structure before the articles matters.
Test with real searches
Not with the article title. Type what a customer would type, misspellings included, and see whether the right thing is in the first three results.
The searches that return nothing are recorded, and that list is the best guide to both settings and content.
Comments
0 comments
Article is closed for comments.