The search (in WebHelp) - how does it work?

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Dave Gehman
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The search (in WebHelp) - how does it work?

Unread post by Dave Gehman »

I had thought that the embedded Zoom search utility in H+M gathered up every word in the published output.

Our users have possibly random times when words they look for have no hit either in Index or Search.

So, back to the post title, how does search work in WebHelp? Does it scour over everything, discarding meaningless stuff (the, a, often, etc.)?
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Tim Green
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Re: The search (in WebHelp) - how does it work?

Unread post by Tim Green »

Hi Dave,

If Zoom indexer collected every instance of every word the index would be pretty unusable. There are two settings that make it more usable, which you can find in the search configuration of the skin. Just open the .hmskin file in Help+Manual (NOT your project!) and go to Configuration > Publishing Options > WebHelp > Full Text Search. You can configure, the excluded words, the minimum length of words that will be included in the index, and the word-joining characters (non-word characters that combine two strings to be considered as a single word).
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Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

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Dave Gehman
Posts: 575
Joined: Sat Sep 23, 2017 9:05 pm

Re: The search (in WebHelp) - how does it work?

Unread post by Dave Gehman »

Yes! As any Roman would have said, mirabile dictu!

(If you do documentation long enough, search becomes a topic that carries great excitement.)

In the sprit of 'give them a centimeter, they'll want a kilometer,' is there a way to create a white-list? That is, words we WANT to have found, INcluded words as opposed to EXcluded words?
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Tim Green
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Re: The search (in WebHelp) - how does it work?

Unread post by Tim Green »

Dave Gehman wrote: Wed Jul 14, 2021 10:36 am In the sprit of 'give them a centimeter, they'll want a kilometer,' is there a way to create a white-list? That is, words we WANT to have found, INcluded words as opposed to EXcluded words?
No, the Zoom indexing system doesn't include a white list functionality. However, everything not excluded by the settings that qualifies as a word should normally get included.
Regards,
Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

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Please do not email or PM me with private support requests -- post to the forum directly.
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