Site search
This page is for website creators who add search to a site. Exponential has a built-in search engine that keeps its index in the database; it is enough for most sites. Large sites or sites that need facets and relevance tuning move to Solr (Search with ezfind and Solr).
Contents
The built-in engine
site.ini [SearchSettings] SearchEngine=eZSearchEngine indexes the attributes marked Searchable in each class when
content is published. Visitors only find what they may read.
The search box
A form that sends SearchText to content/search:
<form role="search" method="get" action={'content/search'|ezurl}>
<label for="site-search">{'Search'|i18n( 'design/mysite' )}</label>
<input type="search" id="site-search" name="SearchText">
<button type="submit">{'Search'|i18n( 'design/mysite' )}</button>
</form>content/advancedsearch offers more fields (phrase, class, date). Both are disallowed for crawlers in the shipped
robots.txt.
The results page
Override content/search.tpl in your design. It receives the results and the search text; show each hit with its line
view, the number of results and paging. Tell the visitor when nothing was found and what to try instead.
Settings that matter
site.ini [SearchSettings]:
| Key | Shipped | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
MaximumSearchLimit | 30 | the most results one page may ask for |
MaximumSearchTextWords, MaximumSearchTextLength | 16, 1024 | longer search texts are cut |
AllowEmptySearch | disabled | an empty search is refused (costly) |
EnableWildcard, MinCharacterWildcard | false, 3 | term* searches; costly on large sites |
StopWordThresholdPercent | 60 | words in more than this share of objects are ignored |
DelayedIndexing | disabled | enabled or classbased: index by cron instead of on publish |
LogSearchStats | disabled | record search phrases |
Mark only useful attributes Searchable: titles, intros, bodies; not internal codes.
Indexing
Content is indexed on publish, or by the default cron part (
indexcontent.php) with delayed indexing (10.8 Search).Rebuild the whole index after an import or a database move:
php bin/php/updatesearchindex.php --clean --allow-root-user
Search statistics
With LogSearchStats=enabled on the public siteaccess, Setup > Search statistics (/search/stats) shows every
phrase, how often it was searched and the average number of results; phrases that found nothing show what content is
missing (5. Search statistics). Phrases can be personal data,
which is why it is off by default.
Related pages
- Search with ezfind and Solr
- Searching (for editors)
- Tagging content with eztags
- Free documentation: this page is free to copy, translate and improve under the GNU FDL 1.3.
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