Search Basics for Experience Builder Sites

Search in Experience Builder Sites

• Experience Cloud is the new name for Community Cloud. It was renamed because Community Cloud lets you build more than just communities (portals, help centers, forums, sites, mobile apps, etc), so a more all-inclusive name was needed.
  
  
• Search is powerful and worth attention because it helps your customers to get around the site. No matter what page they’re on, the search box is always at the top.
• Search alreaady works well out of the box, for a few reasons:
  1. Lemmatization: helps users find different forms of a word. A search for “bean” also returns results for “beans.” Similarly, “grind” returns results for “grinds” and “grinding”.
  2. Spelling Correction: search returns results for the correct versions of misspelled words.
  3. Expanded Queries: if a search term gets no results, search finds matches where the search term is part of a word. For example, a search for “mocha” will return results for “mochaccino” as well.
  4. And/Or Searching: if multiple search terms are included, the first results will include results that include the all the terms (AND). If no results are found, search switches to an “OR,” so it could include results for just the first search term, or just the second search term.
• The most relevant results rise to the top. Results are deemed more relevant if:
  • Search term appears multiple times in the record (more occurrences are better)
  • Search term appears in important fields (examples: Name, Title, and Subject)
  • Customer owns the record (assumption is that records they own are more relevant to them)
  • How often the customer views/edits the record (more often is better)
    
    
• What’s a reason to customize search for your site?
  • Customers find what they’re looking for faster
• How do lemmatization, spelling correction, relaxed queries, and AND/OR search improve search?
  • Widen the net of search results
• Which factors determines a record’s relevance?
  • How often the search term occurs in the record.
  • How often the searching person views the record.

Tailor Global Search to Your Experience Builder Site

• Enable Digital Experiences via: Setup > Quick Find > “Digital Experiences” > Settings > Enable Digital Experiences
  • If enhanced domains are enabled, the domain includes you “My Domain” name in the format MyDomainName.my.site.com for production orgs
  • If enhanced domains are not enabled, select a domain name, and then Check Availability
    • Using something recognizable (like your company name is recommended) is recommended.
    • The domain name is the same for all experiences. To create a unique URL for each experience, you can enter a unique name at the end of the URL. For example if your domain name is UniversalTelco.force.com and you’re creating a customer community, enter customers to create the unique UniversalTelco.force.com/customers
    • Set up a custom domain by entering it on the Domain Management page via: Setup > Quick Find > Domains > Domains
• Configure sites via: Setup > Quick Find > “All Sites” > All Sites
  • Available Site Templates:
    • Build Your Own (LWR), B2C Commerce, Help Center, Customer Account Portal, Customer Service, Build Your Own, Partner Central, Aloha, Salesforce Tabs + Visualforce
    • After configuring a site, you are in an area called Experience Workspaces
• Salesforce recommends using the Global Search Results component instead of the older Sear Results. It can:
  • Make almost any object from the org searchable in the site, including custom objects.
  • Turn on search results filtering, so users can refine their results and find exactly what they need
  • Add a search results overview page, called the “All Results” tab, that lets users see all their best matches in search.
• To configure search in the community, within the “Builder” area of the Experience Workspaces, click “Home” then “Search”
  • The component in the middle of the screen should be a “Global Search Component.” If it is not, add it.
  • By default, Global Search Results shows results for Articles (if Knowledge is enabled), Discussions, Cases (for Service Cloud users), and Groups
  • To add objects to the search, click into it, then click “Add”
• Search Filtering allows users to select a specific object and then apply filters
  • Search Filtering is turned on by default
  • From Setup, go to “Search Layouts” for each object you want to filter. To the layout, add the fields that users want to filter (included field types: checkbox, phone number, picklist, text, URL).
• The Global Search for Peer-to-Peer Communities component (at the top) has a feature called autocomplete that can be configured a few different ways.
  • Autocomplete suggests matching articles, discussions, and more.
    
    
• To make an object searchable in your customer service site:
  • Add the objects to the Global Search for Peer-to-Peer Communities and the Global Search Results components
  • Make sure the object is searchable in Lightning Experience and supported in the Customer Service template
• When you configure Discussions search results:
  • You can choose search results from Groups, feeds on records, and feeds on user profiles
• Too add more objects to the autocomplete results:
  • Choose “add” for Objects for Autocomplete Results and select an object from the list

Set Up Search Customizations

• Synonym Groups have words or phrases that are treated equally in searches - a search for one term in a synonym group returns results for all terms in the group (Ex: “Expresso,” “Espresso”)
  • Access via Setup > Quick Find > “Synonyms” > Synonyms
  • Up to six terms per synonym group can be added, and up to 10,000 synonym groups can be created
• Federated Search is a means of providing search results from external sources like Google, YouTube, Wikipedia, Confluence, SharePoint
  • More info here on setting it up
    
    
• Who can create synonym groups, and where?
  • Salesforce admin can create synonym groups on the synonyms page, found in Setup for the Salesforce org
• What happens after federated search is set up?
  • Search results from external sources are shown in the site’s search results page

Make Better Decisions with Search Analytics

• The Community Search Dashboard is included with an AppExchange package called “Winter ‘19 Salesforce Community Management Package for Communities with Chatter”, Package ID 04t1J000000OUuGQAW. Updated versions of the same package may now be available.
  • It allows you to answer questions like:
    • Which search terms are members searching for the most?
    • Which search terms aren’t getting any results?
    • What type of member is searching for a term?
  • An example dashboard might include:
    • Top Searches in the last 30 days
    • Searches with No Results
    • Fewest Search Results by Term
  • Access the dashboards via: Experience Workspace > Dashboards
• See this trailhead module for detailed info on configuring the dashboards
  
  
• To edit reports on search activity in your site:
  • Go to Workspace > Dashboards > Settings > Edit next to Community Search Dashboard 2.0
• What problem could a synonym group solve?
  • Both “hot” and “scalding” are on the list of top search terms, but “scalding” isn’t getting any results
• Which report best helps you decide what kinds of articles to add?
  • Top Searches in the last 30 Days
  • Searches with No Results