In Telligent Enterprise 4.0, search results are influenced by content quality scores so that you see the best, most relevant results first. Pressing "Enter" on the keyboard when you're in the search page causes search to be performed instead of returning no result. Status messages and comments on applications are now indexed as part of #hashtag and @mentions support. Search is also now easily extensible. You can easily add your own search provider, or create plugins for new content types that will then be indexed by search. In addition, facets are now dynamic and can be defined by developers.
Example search
The following example shows a search for content with the tag "product" utilizing Telligent Enterprise 4.0's new #hashtag search capability. The short results give you the option to select all results or those specifically in an application.
When you select Show All, you're presented with the faceted search results page. This page allows you to filter results by:
- Places
- Groups
- Authors
- Tags
- Dates
In this window, the indicator block in the left navigation bar moves beside the place (for example, forums, blogs, files, groups, people, or wikis) where your results reside. If it is located beside the Everywhere item, this means your results are being pulled from all content types.
Note that if RSS is enabled for the site, you will see an RSS icon to subscribe to search results. Subscribing to all content, *.*, is not supported.
Search result filtering
You can use faceting to focus your results by selecting one or more filters to apply. In this case, we're filtering to forum results.
The results change according to the filter(s) you apply. If you change the filter, add a filter, or remove a filter, the results change accordingly. You can apply a place filter (for example, blogs), and then drill down to results with specific groups, authors, tags, or dates.
Activity stream comments for new users, new group users, new friendships, new user avatars, and third-party messages are not indexed.
The order of search filters does not affect the results you receive.
Drilling down to post information
If you click or hover your mouse over a result, relevant information appears for the entry:
- For a forum post, the number of responses is listed
- For a blog post, the comments are listed
- For a wiki post, the views and revisions are listed
- For a comment, the number of likes are listed
If you decide to view (for example) the blog post, you can click the post name and the post will appear. The post will display comments and likes.
If you use the same name for an 'application/place' and a 'post' when you create a group, you might see the results show twice in the search results page as shown below. This is because Telligent Enterprise is counting the application/place twice.
Content quality effect on search results
In Telligent Enterprise 4.0, search results are weighted for quality so that the best, most relevant results are displayed first. Factors contributing to this scoring include liking, helpfulness, ratings, tagging, bookmarking, views, sharing, subscriptions, comments, and marking as featured.
Comment and status message search support
You can now find conversations more easily than ever before by incorporating hashtags into your search experience.
You can find conversations using single terms, multiple terms, or multiple conversations.
Searching for single terms, #hashtagged terms, or @mentioned names
Type the <single term>, <#term>, or <@name> into the search field.
Searching for multiple terms
- If you want to search for multiple instances of a #hashtag, @mention, or textual references, you can simply type them into the search field.
- Typing a #hashtag term or @mention term (for example, #bryce @janeadams) into the search field will yield all results that contain those two terms. You can't get a list of all tags by typing # into the search field. Instead, use the Tag Cloud widget.
- Just typing two textual words into the search field will yield results containing those text references or #hashtag references (for example, typing #bryce canyon).
FAQ about forum search results
Q: When I searched for an issue in my forum, the search page said there were 27 forum posts about the subject. When I click forums, the top of the page shows 27 results, but then forums shows 38 posts. However, when I manually counted the results, there are indeed 27. So why is Telligent reporting different numbers of results for the same forum?
A. What you're seeing is a behavior called collapsing that occurs only with forum posts and replies in Telligent Enterprise. Replies to the same thread will be collapsed to display only the thread in the search results list. So in the case of the above questions, there were 38 forum documents, but only 27 of them were separate threads. Telligent Enterprise hid the thread replies to avoid muddying up the the result list. But you can view all results for a forum thread by clicking it.
Collapsing can be disabled if desired in the communityserver.config file.
Related information
Search extensibility