Searching Knowledgebase

How search works

By default, KBPublisher's search functionality uses MySQL full-text searching, which is a natural language search that allows you to type in a question or sentence that describes the information you are searching for. The program uses logic to determine the keywords in the sentence.

Optionally, you can use Sphinx search engine. Sphinx is a full-text search engine that provides fast and relevant full-text search functionality. For more information, see How to enable Sphinx Search.

What it searches

If you did not specify any search options, the search functionality examines the following:

• Article: title, content, meta description, keywords (tags)
• File: title, file name, content , keywords (tags)
• News: title, content, keywords (tags)

The advanced search allows you to narrow your search to a specific content type or date range, or to restrict your search to titles, keywords/tags, or entry IDs. In addition, depending on the content type you've selected, extra options let you choose categories or article types to search.

Special search

If you enter a numeric value in the search box, the search identifies articles or files with this ID number. To find numeric values in article contents, type the number with quotation marks, such as "123". You can change this behavior in Settings -> Common by checking or clearing the "Search by Article ID" checkbox.

To force search by article id, type id:[entry_id], which will search articles with this ID, if article exits it will be opened.
To force search by file id, type file_id:[entry_id], which will search file with this ID.
To force search in title only, type title:[search string], which will search articles, files, or news in titles only, depending on which section you search.
To force search by tags, type tags:[tag1],[tag2], which will search articles, files, or news with these tags, depending on which section you search.

If special search is applied search string will be highlighted in green, like this.

Search results

The search results page shows the number of results found. For each result, you can see the item's title, a content preview, the item's location in the knowledge base, the date the item was last updated, and number of article comments.

Search suggest

As you type in the search field, the search engine offers suggested results based on popular content or spelling variations. To have this option you should follow the steps to enable searching spell suggest, which is off by default.