Search Tools: Advanced Tools

In the Search Tools feature in Composer, Advanced Tools are search features that provide an extra, added layer of searchability for visitors to your site. This article will focus on how Advanced Tools as a part of Search Tools can work for you. 

In this Article

• Advanced Tools overview
• Use Advanced Syntax
• Use Results Preview
• Use Search Synonyms

Advanced Tools overview

After Advanced Tools have been activated for your site, they can be managed from the Search Tools menu in the Composer left navigation.

Open up the Advanced Tools tab in your Search Tools feature. 

The Advanced Tools are:

• Advanced Syntax: Allow users to specify exact-match phrases and exclusion phrases in search results.
• Results Preview: Displays suggested results live on the page as the user enters their search terms.
• Manage Synonyms: Create custom words and phrases that automatically return selected pages when entered as search terms.

Use Advanced Syntax

In the context of a web search, “syntax” refers to extra characters you can add to a search to refine how the results appear. The syntax in Finalsite Search allows for exact-phrase matching, and term exclusion.

• Exact Phrases: Putting a search phrase in quotation marks forces the search engine to only show pages where the search terms exist in the exact order you specify. So searching for varsity soccer might display the result “Boys Soccer Varsity Team,” while searching for “varsity soccer”> would not.
• Excluding Results: Adding a minus (-) sign immediately before a search term forces the search engine to exclude from the results any pages with that term.
  • Example: soccer -varsity would return all pages that include the word “soccer,” except those that >also include the term “varsity.”

Use Results Preview

• When the Results Preview feature is active, end users will see possible matches for their search terms appear as they are typing, autocomplete-style.
• As the user types more, the results will be further refined to match the user’s input.
• Results Preview must be activated in the element settings for a given Search element. It’s a per-element setting, not a global setting for all Search elements on your site.

Use Search Synonyms

Search Synonyms allow admins to define certain words that may be unique to their school and therefore difficult for a search engine to otherwise understand. For example, “kids” might be set as a synonym for “children.”

• Click the green Add Synonym button to create a new Search Synonym.
  
• Select the synonym type, Synonym or One-way Synonym.
  • Synonym: For a regular Synonym, admins can supply one or more words, all of which are considered equivalent (“athletics” = “sports” = “phys ed,” for example.) To create Synonyms, simply enter all of the equivalent words in the “Synonyms” field.
  • One-way Synonym: Here, Word A can stand in for Word B, but Word B cannot stand in for Word A. This can be used to create synonyms for generalizations (think, “all squares are rectangles, but not all rectangles are squares”), or simply to link search terms that refer to the same concept but are not identical.