Ever wondered how the search functionality in your Hub works? In this article, we'll explain the nuts and bolts of Hub Search.
What's Hub Search?
Did you know your Hub has a search function? Visitors to your Hub can access it by clicking this little magnifying glass in the top right corner of your Hub:
...which opens a search box when you click it:
What can Hub Search find?
When you enter a search term, Hub Search will search through all non-hidden Hub Items in any of the following Stream types:
- Blogs
- Docs
- Videos
- Marketing
It will not search in Sales Streams (because they're hidden) or in Social Streams.
Hub Search will look for keyword matches in titles, descriptions and body content for Items, and in titles and descriptions only for Flipbooks. If you want, you also have the option of looking for matches among tags! To learn how to turn this on, check out this article.
How are search results sorted?
All Items in the Hub that match the search query are assigned a relevance score. This is built using various factors, including the number of terms matching the search. The search results are then presented by relevance score, with the highest-scoring (most relevant) items at the top.
In addition, they are also categorized by the type of content, i.e. Blog, Docs, etc. If there are more than five results for a given category, only the top five are shown, along with a Load More button.
Also, whenever a new Item is added to the Hub, or Items are deleted or modified, the search database will be updated in near-real-time, so subsequent searches will show updated results.
What about Items that are in multiple Streams?
Items can appear in multiple Streams, such as Marketing Streams. If an Item is present in more than one non-hidden Stream, it will still only show up in Hub Search results once.
The way Hub Search decides which version of the Item to show is to re-run the search with the original search terms, but looking for only matches in the titles and descriptions of the Streams that the Item appears in.
Hub Search will then display the Item in the context of the Stream with the highest relevance score — unless all scores are the same, in which case the Item is shown in its Source Stream (i.e. the Source Blog Stream, Video Stream, etc.). If the Source Stream is hidden, the Marketing Stream with the lowest ID will be used instead.
Additional facts about Hub Search
- Recent searches will be stored in the user's browser, so that whenever they search again, their most recently searched terms will be shown. We store a maximum of 5 recent searches.
- The maximum number of results returned for any search query is 100.
- Search queries must be a minimum of three characters long, otherwise no results will be returned.