Modern Campus CMS Website Search

• Search Profile: Enter the name of your search profile, used by the search appliance. This should already be set up and will only need to be changed if you are adding a new configuration page for a separate account.

• Theme: Choose a theme for your search page to display. Custom themes can be added at /_resources/search/themes/custom/.
• Enable Theme Coloring: Check this box to enable the following field coloration on the live search page.
• Theme Color: Specify the single color to be used as the theme color. Can be entered as a hex value, RGB, RGBA, HSL, or HSLA format.
• Loading Icon: Choose a GIF to display while results load.

• Autocomplete Length: Specify the number of characters a web visitor would have to type into the search box before the Query Autocomplete displays.
• Advanced: Check this box if you want the advanced search options to be available for search users.
• Branding Icon: Check this box if you want the Modern Campus CMS Search logo to be displayed on your page.

• Number Pagination: Check this box if you want the numbered pagination to display. If unchecked, the next and previous pagination text still display. To edit the number of pages shown, go to the search appliance admin settings and change Page Links Shown. If this number is set to “0,” no pagination displays.
• Next Pagination: Enter the text for the pagination indicating the next page (for example “Next,” “Next Page,” “Go Forward”).
• Previous Pagination: Enter the text for the pagination indicating the previous page (for example “Previous,” “Previous Page,” “Go Back”).

• Total Results: Check this box to display the total number of results.
• Total Results Text: Enter the text that displays before the number of total results. If “Total Results” is not checked, this text does not display.
• Results Range Before Text: Enter the text that goes before the number of results displayed on the page, for example “Displaying:” or “Viewing results.”
• Results Range Middle Text: Enter the text that goes in between the start and end number of the results displayed range, for example “to” or “-.”
• Results Range After Text: Enter the text that goes after the number of results displayed on the page, for example “results.” or “pages.”

Editing these three text fields does not affect the number range of results displayed. The number of results displayed per page is set in search appliance admin interface under Results Per Page.

• Parametric Heading: Enter the heading for the section containing parametric field categories, for example “Refine Search” or “Tags.”
• Parametric Mobile Button: Enter the text for the button that displays on mobile to view parametrics, for example “View Parametrics” or “Refine Search.” This button only displays if the web page is being rendered under a certain width. Parametric search options do not display at all if none of the results returned are tagged with any parametric fields. You should have been provided with documentation for how to set up parametric tagging upon the implementation of Modern Campus CMS Website Search; if you need additional assistance, contact our support team.

• Best Bet Heading: Enter the heading that displays before any best bet results that are returned, for example “Featured Results.” If no best bets are returned, this heading does not display.
• Spell Check: Enter the text that displays before suggestions for a misspelled search query, for example “Did you mean.”
• No Result Found: Enter the message that displays if no results are found. The format should be a sentence that leaves the end open for the search query, for example “Sorry, no results were found for.”

• Form Placeholder: Enter the placeholder text in the search field, for example “Search here” or “Search site...”
• Submit Button Text: Enter the text for the button you click to run a search, for example “Search for” or “Submit.”
• Filtering By Text: If you have directory filtering set up for a search results page, enter the text that displays before the section name on the results page, for example “Filtering by” or “Viewing results in.”
• Filtering By Button: If you have directory filtering set up for a search results page, enter the text that goes on the button users click to remove the filter.

• Directory Filter: Limit the displayed results to indexed pages which begin with a common URL string. In this field, specify the fully qualified URL string to the directory where result pages are located. Add a trailing slash and an asterisk at the end to allow for all pages within this directory. For example, a directory filter of https://moderncampus.com/blogs/* means search queries only return pages located inside the /blogs directory.

The address(es) from which the site search starts. Multiple URLs can be listed, one per line. Folder URLs (for example http://www.gallena.edu/academics/) should include a final forward slash "/".

Tells the search appliance whether it should respect the robots.txt file or any meta robots tags within a page. The robots.txt file must be located at the root of a Base URL(s) item.

List extensions to exclude any files with those extensions from the search. For example, you may wish to exclude image files from coming up as search results. Include the leading period for each extension and separate them with a space.

If there are any pages, folders, or files you wish to exclude from the search, enter the information here. Any URL containing the string specified (be that a word or a full path) is excluded from the walk.

Once your site has been indexed, it is walked periodically to index any changes you've made to URLs, file structure, etc. The options for Rewalk Type are:

• "New": Completely starts from scratch and re-indexes everything using your base URL(s), as well as clearing the query logs.
• "Refresh All": Uses your existing database and only downloads modified and new pages, as well as deleting pages that no longer exist.
• "Refresh": Behaves like a "Refresh All" walk, but checks URLs on a basis of how frequently they are updated. For example, it checks for a daily modified page with each walk, but may only check for a page modified every six months on every third walk or so.
• "Singles Only": Only walks single pages, single URLs, and single files. See "Single Page" and "Page URL" in the All Walk Settings section.

It's recommended to use Refresh or Refresh All unless you've done significant information architecture changes and need to immediately re-crawl every page on the site. Once you've done a New crawl, you can set this back to Refresh or Refresh All.

Choose how often automatic rewalks are performed. You can choose from every day of the week, as well as daily, hourly, every fifteen minutes, every minute, or only when a change is made to the website, and specify the hour of the day at which the rewalk is run. Multiple rewalk schedules can be made, so you could have rewalks scheduled to run at Sunday at 4 AM and Wednesday at 10 PM simultaneously.

Send a notification email to this address after a scheduled rewalk occurs. Use this field with the next one if you would like the current query log sent to you before doing a New walk (which clears the log data).

Attach the specified information logs to the notification email. Set "Query Log" to "Y" if you would like the current query log sent to you before doing a New walk (which clears the log data).

If desired, specify URLs to index by listing them all on a webpage, and then providing that single address to Search in the "URL URL" field. This is in addition to the basic walk that starts at the base URL.

List individual page URLs you want to include in the database. These pages are indexed, but the links on them aren't followed.

Like “URL URL,” this field points to a single webpage where you list the URLs you want to index. However, any URLs listed on that page are processed individually like single pages, and won't have any links on them followed.

Excluding certain page sections from search results can improve accuracy, especially when some words commonly appear on a large number of pages. For example, if you have a user searching for “contact us,” and the footer on your site includes “Contact Us” information, then Website Search provides every page with that footer as a result. By using “Ignore Tags,” you can tell Website Search to ignore information contained within specified HTML tags when it is looking for results.

“Keep Tags” is the inverse of “Ignore Tags.” By using “Keep Tags,” you instruct Website Search to look only for results that occur within the specified tags.

Set Regular Expression rules which allow Website Search to identify webpages which belong to specific Parametric Filtering categories.

Further specify which content is searched when a user enters a query. These fields correspond to the sections of your page that are specified in the HTML. Fields listed higher are given priority in the search results.

Identify pages with duplicate content to prevents those duplicates from appearing in a search results list. For example, www.domain.edu/ and www.domain.edu/index.html would be flagged as duplicates.

Identifies the fields that Website Search compares when identifying duplicate pages.

Identifies the filename that would be added to the trailing slash of a section URL. These filenames are stripped from URLs within the index to prevent duplicates from being walked.

When “Y” is selected, walks stay under the path specified in the base URL(s). When “N” is selected, walks may wander out of the path to other locations on the same site if a hyperlink for such a place is encountered. This is helpful if you have created a separate profile for a sub-section of the site. For example, you might create a separate profile for their course catalog. Your catalog might be in a /catalog/ folder, and you want to limit search results in this profile to the course catalog section of the site.

Enter notes about your profile here. It isn't used by the walk or search, nor is it visible to web visitors.

When query logging is turned on to "Y", Website Search records every query web visitors search for.

Defines when query logs are rotated. Rotating a query log sends the data, if desired, to an email address, and then clears it from the log table. If you turn this on, all existing data is lost.

Defines what content is included in the abstract for search results. The options for Abstract Style are:

• Query: Displays a portion of the page’s body content which included the queried word(s).
• Beginning: Displays the beginning of the page’s body content, regardless of whether the queried word(s) appear in this content.
• Top: Displays the top of the page’s content including the header, regardless of whether the queried word(s) appear in this content.
• Description: Displays the page’s meta description, regardless of whether the queried word(s) appear in this content.

Maximum length, in characters, that displays on the search results page for the abstract, title, and URL respectively. Content that surpasses this maximum length are cut off and appended with an ellipsis (…).

"Results per Page" determines how many results are shown on at a page at a time. "Page Links Shown" determines pages in the pagination are shown at a time. ("Max User Results per Page" is set at -1 to prevent website visitors from overriding these settings.)

Specifies how parametric field categories should be handled. To display properly, categories should have all three checkboxes checked (Searchable, Sortable, and Output).

Specifies how parametric field values should be displayed on the live search page. Set to Count Descending by default, this lists the value with the most page matches first and give a descending list from there.

If Query Autocomplete is set to Y, this causes the live search page to suggest matches between the characters typed by the web visitor and words contained in the index. Max Completions specifies the maximum number of autocomplete suggestions which are displayed on the live search page. Less suggestions appear if the queried word(s) appear in fewer pages in the index.

Controls how queried words are highlighted in the abstract on the live search page. The options for Results Highlighting are:

• Inline: Queried words in the title or abstract are bolded and displayed with a brightly colored background. Each queried word, up to ten, receives a unique background color before the coloration repeats.
• Bold: Queried words in the title or abstract are bolded.
• Classes: Each queried word in the title or abstract is wrapped in a span with the class of query and individual queried words also have the class of queryset1 through queryset10 for custom CSS to target.
• None: Queried words in the title or abstract do not have any special styling.

Determines how best bet keywords are matched to search queries. The options for Best Bet Match Mode are:

• Show when search query is contained in Best Bet keywords: The entire search query must be contained within the best bet keywords in order for a best bet to appear on the live search page. For example, a best bet with the keywords academic calendar would match the search queries of academic, calendar, or academic calendar. However, a query of school academic calendar would not match because the query had more text than what was contained in the keywords.
• Show when Best Bet keywords are contained in search query: The entire best bet keywords text must be contained within the search query. For example, a best bet with the keyword financial would match the search queries of financial aid and financial assistance. However, a best bet with the keywords of financial aid would not match financial assistance because the keywords text was not completely contained in the search query. When this option is chosen, it’s best to set up a separate best bet with a single keyword for URLs which should be returned for multiple keywords.

Enable Spell Check, when “Y” is selected, prompts the web visitor with possible index matches when the original search query yielded no results. Number of Suggestions specifies how many prompts should be provided.

Defines how phrases and synonyms should be handled by Website Search. The options for Synonyms are:

• Disabled: Built-in phrases and synonyms are not returned. A web visitor can still use the quotation marks around a query to treat multiple words as a single phrase.
• Phrase recognition only: Built-in phrases are treated as a singular query. For example, searching for post office is treated as a single query and does not act as a query for post and a query for office.
• Phrases & Allow synonyms: Built-in phrases are treated as a singular query and the web visitor has the option to include synonyms for specific words in the query. To identify which words should return synonyms as well, the web visitor must type a tilde (~) before that word.
• Phrases & Use synonyms by default: Built-in phrases are treated as a singular query and synonyms are returned by default. For example, a query for library returns results with the word book.

Select a thesaurus to use for the search. Website Search can utilize a thesaurus when queries are entered with a ~ (tilde) character preceding them to produce related results. To add a custom thesaurus, contact Modern Campus support.

Defines how different word forms of a queried word are handled by Website Search. The options for Word Forms are:

• Exact Match: Only exact matches to the queried word form are returned.
• Plurals & possessives: Plural or possessive forms of the queried word are also returned.
• Any word forms: Any form of the queried word are returned.
• Custom: Allows administrators to define the list of suffixes that are returned.

These settings control how the search algorithm ranks pages returned during a search query.

• Word Ordering: Determines ranking in multi-word queries. Gives higher ranking to pages where the queried words appear in the same order as in the query.
• Word Proximity: Determines ranking in multi-word queries. Gives higher ranking to pages where the queried words appear closer together in the body content.
• Database Frequency: Determines ranking in multi-word queries. Gives higher ranking to pages which contain the queried word that appears least frequently in the database.
• Document Frequency: Determines ranking in single- or multi-word queries. Gives higher ranking to pages which contain more instances of the queried word(s).
• Position in Text: Determines ranking in single- or multi-word queries. Gives higher ranking to pages where the queried word(s) appear closer to the top of the page.
• Depth in Site: Determines ranking in single- or multi-word queries. Gives higher ranking to pages which are located closer to the root of the site.

Adds a negative bias to older pages.

Adds a positive or negative bias to pages/files based upon a regular expression rule. For example, Rank Bias could be set up to give a negative bias to PDF files so a search query would display HTML pages higher on the list than PDF files.

The query report is a log of all queries that visitors have entered into the search. It gives the date and time of the query, the IP address from which it was entered, how many results Website Search gave for that result, and (if a result was clicked) the URL that the visitor chose.

This lists all individual words that have been entered as queries, in order of how many times they have been entered. It does not distinguish between repeated queries, for example searching “college schedule” and “class schedule” would result in two counts for the word “schedule.”

This lists all queries that have been entered, in order of how many times they've been entered.

This lists all queries that have been entered in the search and had no results come up.

A best bet is a result manually set to appear as a promoted answer for a specific query or queries (the next section details how to create and manage them). The “Best Bet Clicks” report lists all best bets that have been clicked on by web visitors, including the keyword that brought up that best bet and the original query.