Related Links
You can download PDF versions of the Content Contributor's, Administrator's, and Elements Reference documents from the support section of paperthin.com (requires login).
For technical support:
CommonSpot’s robust Site Search capabilities include the following:
Prior to 10.6, by default, CommonSpot used the search engine native to the ColdFusion and Lucee engine running CommonSpot. Beginning with CommonSpot 10.6 we no longer support the Solr versions that ship with ColdFusion and Lucee. For optimal search results PaperThin recommends that you install the latest version of the Solr search engine and configure CommonSpot to use this search engine natively. See the CommonSpot Search Settings in the Configuration section of the Server Administration dashboard for more information, as well as the Solr Search engine Installation guide.
You can also use other search engines by implementing CommonSpot’s plugable search engine interface. For more information review this topic in the CommonSpot Developer’s Guide.
Site search functionality is exposed to site visitors in the form of Search Forms and Search Results pages. A site can provide one or more search forms. For example, paperthin.com has a main search page, as well as separate pages for searching just the Blog and Knowledgebase subsites to return results specific to Blog and KB content. How many search forms your site has is up to you.
You typically use the out-of-the box CommonSpot Search Form element to create your search form, and the out-of-the box CommonSpot Search Results element to display the results. These two elements can be placed on the same page, or different pages. It is also possible to create your own custom search form but utilize the CommonSpot Search Results element, to display the results. You simply need to POST the same form parameters that the standard Search Form element does in order for the Search Results element to work.
See Search Form Element and Search Results Element in the Content Contributor’s Guide for more information.
Use Site Search options within CommonSpot Site Administration to efficiently
Please note that the Site Admin - Site Search section applies to internal searches using the CommonSpot Search and Search Results elements only. It does not apply to external Google or Bing searches. To view and analyze external searches results, see SEO Administration, Analytics and Analytics Settings.
The Site Search menu is visible to users with Site Maintenance privileges.
Each CommonSpot site can have one or more full-text search collections that index your content. For each collection, you designate the subsites and/or custom elements to index. Then when building a Search Form, or when searching as a contributor, you specify which subsites to include in the search. CommonSpot uses the subsite list to determine which collections to search.
How many collections you have is up to you. Large sites may choose to maintain multiple collections to speed re-indexing of specific sections of your site, but this an option and not required.
To create and manage your full-text search collections, use the Manage Full-Text Search Collections menu in the Site Search section of the Site Administration dashboard. Or, to control indexing of the content within a subsite, use the Search menu option under the Configuration section within Subsite Administration .
Please note that full-text search indexing is used for both internal site visitor searches and searching by content contributors through the CommonSpot Quick Search and Tools > Find interfaces. Even if you do not provide native CommonSpot search facilities (that is, use a Google appliance instead), you may still want to enable full-text indexing so that CommonSpot internal full-text searching works for contributors.
To manage collections through CommonSpot, the search service must be running on the server. Use Server Administration - Utilities - Check Full-Text Engine Configuration to test and verify your search configuration.
CommonSpot separately tracks and stores analytics for each search results page, including the keywords (or keyword phrases) searched for, which items were clicked within the results set, and search term position within search results. Use the Search Summary and Search History reports in Site Administration to get a full understanding of how your visitors use your internal search capabilities. You can see:
For more information see:
Search Summary - This dialog shows a summary of the terms searched for during a specified period (day, week, month). This allows you to get a high level view for what was searched for, how many times and results and clicks for each search term.
Search History - This dialog reports details for every search performed within your site, based on the search results page and date range you select.
In order to better control which search results visitors click, you can register "Featured" search results for specific keywords or keyword phrases, and display those results at the top of the results list.
Registering a Featured result binds one or more pages with a keyword (or keyword phrase) for a search results page. The page displays "Featured" results, when you configure the Search Results element for that page to return results categorized as "Featured." Visitors searching for a keyword or keyword phrase registered as Featured results see links to the bound pages first in the results set, making it more likely that they will be clicked.
Related Links
You can download PDF versions of the Content Contributor's, Administrator's, and Elements Reference documents from the support section of paperthin.com (requires login).
For technical support: