Search feature returning content from different projects

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Sean Godley
Posts: 92
Joined: Sun Apr 24, 2016 6:10 am

Search feature returning content from different projects

Unread post by Sean Godley »

Hi guys,

I have created about twenty manuals for my company and they are live on the website. The users are experiencing an issue when they use the search feature that is added by default when publishing to Webhelp. When they go into a manual and search for whatever terms they want to find in the manual, the search returns pages from the manual that they were in when they did the search, as well as other manuals on the website and in some cases older versions of manuals that are no longer live. Is this a bug, or is there a setting that I need to change in the manuals before publishing?

Thanks,

Sean
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Tim Green
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Re: Search feature returning content from different projects

Unread post by Tim Green »

Hi Sean,

What is happening here is you are publishing repeatedly to the same folder and uploading everything in the folder, without deleting all the files in the output folder first. The search index is generated from the HTML files in the output folder, and when you don't delete the old files before publishing they will be included in the search as well. Similarly, if you don't regularly delete the files on your web server Google and other search engines will continue to index and find them and they will continue to be found there.

Another thing you need to be careful about is when you are using conditional tags to exclude topics:
  • If you exclude a chapter with a conditional tag you must also exclude all the topics it contains individually. If you don't do this the TOC entries will be excluded (because they belong to the chapter) but not the associated files, and then they will still be exported and found in the search.
  • Similarly, if you exclude topics and there are links to them in other topics it is possible for your settings for handling dead links in View > Program Options > Compilers to silently include the linked topics to prevent dead links. (This will be listed in the Compiler Report when you publish.) For details on handling dead links like this properly see this topic in the help.
Regards,
Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

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Sean Godley
Posts: 92
Joined: Sun Apr 24, 2016 6:10 am

Re: Search feature returning content from different projects

Unread post by Sean Godley »

Perfect - thanks Tim, I will check it out and see if I can it fixed.

Sean
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