Search Weighted

Search Weighted  is an app which enables users to search for content, products, and files and displaying the results in a list sorted by weight (relevance).

Search Weighted also makes it possible to add search terms and meta-tags to specific pages, to make them rank higher in the search results, and searching through the contents of e.g. Word or PDF documents.

Please note that in almost all cases Search Weighted should be regarded as deprecated. It has been replaced by the much faster and much more flexible repository-based search and indexing engine.

In frontend the Search Weighted app might appear as in Figure 1.1.

Figure 1.1 Search results

In this article, you can read about adding, configuring and using the app on your solution.

On an overall level, the Search Weighted app allows you to:

• Select a search method
• Search one or more areas of your website – page and paragraph content, Ecommerce content, and file systems content
• Display the search with customizable weight values assigned to e.g., the title or the description of the content searched

Depending on which areas you search, you also have access to settings and configurations particular to those areas – see more below.

To use the app add it to a paragraph - you then have access to the app settings (Figure 2.1) which can be used to control the app behavior.

Figure 2.1 App settings

The first items on the app settings are the Search method, Search in and Weight settings (Figure 3.1).

Figure 3.1 Configuring the search method, area, and weighting of the app instance

With these settings, you must:

• Select a search method
• Select one or more areas to search
• Specify weights in order to vary the relevance (and thus order) of the search results. Weighting is relative - setting all weights to 10 has the same effect as setting all to 1. The relevance is displayed in parentheses next to each search result (as a percentage of the most relevant result, which is always 100%). 1 is the lowest relative weight, 10 is the highest. You can assign weights to:
  • Title
  • Text
  • Description (for pages only)
  • Keywords (for pages only)

Many users find it useful to see the breadcrumb trail for a particular search result – but there are also scenarios where it’s undesirable. To accomodate either scenario, use the breadcrumb settings (Figure 4.1).

Figure 4.1 The breadcrumb settings

Using the breadcrumb settings, you can:

• Enable (or disable) showing a breadcrumb trail – don’t forget that you must output it using the DwSearchResultPath template tag in the element template, see below.
• Add a link to the trail
• Choose to include the language layer in the breadcrumb trial – optionally including the first page of the language layer

The Page Content settings (Figure 5.1) are used to control how to search in page and pararaph content.

Figure 5.1 The settings for searching pages and paragraphs

Your options are: 

If your app is set to search in News, you can use the News settings (Figure 6.1) to control the app behavior.

Figure 6.1 Searching news

You must:

• Select a page on which to show the search results
• Provide a paragraph ID for the paragraph which should contain the results. If you want the paragraph to maintain its own layout, check the maintain paragraph layout on page checkbox

You can control which categories should be included in the search:

• All categories
• A number of manually selected categories

If your app is set to search in Ecommerce (e.g. product catalog), you can use the Product Catalog settings (Figure 7.1) to control the app behavior.

Figure 7.1 Searching a product catalog

You must:

• Select a page on which to show the search results
• Provide a paragraph ID for the paragraph which should contain the results. If you want the paragraph to maintain its own layout, check the maintain paragraph layout on page checkbox

With the Product Groups settings, you can control which groups should be searchable:

• All top groups in a particular shop
• A number of manually selected groups (including subgroups, if the appropriate checkbox is selected)

You can also control which (if any) custom product fields and custom product group fields should be searchable – and whether to include extended variants or not.

Search results are usually displayed on a list, and for performance and usability reasons it’s a good idea to split the full list into pages. To do so, use the paging settings (Figure 9.1).

Figure 9.1 Paging settings

With the paging settings, you can:

• Specify the desired number of results per page
• Customize the forward and back buttons