Site Search

Every published, editable item on your site is indexed, regardless of type. (Content types include the core Content Page, Landing Page, News Item, and FAQ types, plus any content types provided by optional features such as Service Catalog and Portfolio). All editable content is indexed: the body content, all other fields, and any widgets you have added. Banner, menu, and footer text is not indexed.

Additionally, the alt text of images is indexed. If your pages include images that convey information, adding appropriate alt text will improve the searchability of your site.

Site search does not index content that is not hosted on your site. You cannot add other sites to your site search. The content of embedded widgets such as Berkeley Events calendar, Twitter, or Google Docs is not indexed.

When content is indexed

Content is re-indexed as soon as you save the page. In addition, the search indexer runs hourly and checks for changes that may not have been indexed.

Punctuation is not indexed; only letters and numbers are indexed.

"Letters" includes characters in non-Latin alphabets such as Cyrillic, characters with diacritics such as accents and umlauts, and non-alphabetic character sets such as Chinese.

Characters with diacritics, and characters in non-Latin alphabets, are transliterated in the search index. For example, searching for "Gabriel García Márquez" or for "Gabriel Garcia Marquez" will return the same results, regardless of whether your page uses the accented or the base characters.

The minimum length for words is 3 characters. Words shorter than 3 characters are ignored and not indexed.

All searches are case-insensitive. Searching for "bIT" or "bit" returns the same results, including pages with "BIT," "bIT," "bit," or any variant capitalization.

Only whole words are indexed. Searching for "precip" will not return results that include the word "precipitation."

Punctuation

Hyphens are ignored and treated as if the hyphenated parts are all the same word, so for example "long-standing" is indexed as "longstanding."

All other punctuation is treated the same as whitespace, which means that it is considered a word boundary. For example, "Rinse&Repeat" is indexed as two separate words, "Rinse" and "Repeat."

The search index assigns weights to indexed words depending on where they appear in the content and how they are tagged. For example, words that are part of a page title are rated 8 times more important than ordinary text content.

Creating titles and headings that relate to the content they describe will improve the searchability of your site.

Weights

• Page titles: 8x
• H1 headings: 5x
• H2 headings: 3x
• H3 headings: 2x
• Bold text: 2x
• Italic text: 1.5x

All other tags use the standard weight of 1x.

Search result order

The order of search results depends on the density and weight of the search keywords on your site. Generally speaking, more instances of a word on a page will mean that the page appears higher in the results for that word.

Optimizing for findability by internal search is similar to optimizing for findability by external search engines such as Google.

• Do not render text as images.
• Use appropriate alt text for images.
• Create page titles that describe the page content.
• Use headings that describe and organize your page content.
• Do not over-use headings to boost specific words.
• Do not attempt to stuff your pages with keywords.

The internal site search is not a spider like Google; it does not follow links from page to page. Instead, it indexes the text content that is stored for each page. This means that pages are indexed and returned in results even if there are no links to them.

Site search does not compute page rankings based on incoming links, volume of clicks, or other measures of page popularity.

Site search does not adjust results based on things like the searcher's location, previous searches, or whether they are logged in.

Site search does not index non-HTML content such as PDF documents or video captions.