How the search works

This guide walks you through the key aspects of the search feature in the Product Documentation Center.

The Product Documentation Center uses AWS OpenSearch to index and display search results from all the pages on this site and to deliver a seamless and optimized search experience specifically designed for help centers. This ensures that you can easily find the help you need, regardless of where you are navigating within the site.

Search ranking

The Documentation Center's search feature prioritizes results based on relevance. Pages with the exact search term in the title are ranked highest.

Example

A page titled "Send a fax job request" will rank higher than a page where "send a fax job request" appears only in the body.

Fuzzy search and exact matches

Exact matches appear first in search results, followed by fuzzy matches.

Incorporating the fuzzy search feature, the Documentation Center allows for more flexibility in search results. This feature uses the so-called Levenshtein distance to detect words that require only a few character edits to match the input term. These edits may include changing, removing, or inserting a character.

Example

Searching for "TSID" may return results such as "CSID" because changing "T" to "C" is a minimal (one-character) edit that is recognized by the algorithm.

This design allows for capturing minor typos and spelling variations effectively.

Search Experience

The Product Documentation Center provides a flexible search experience. It includes the following features.

Search bars

Every page in the Documentation Center features a search bar, ensuring easy access to search functionality, for example:

Search on the Home page

Search on a standard help page

Quick search

As you type into the search bar, the most relevant results appear instantly. This quick search feature allows direct access to relevant pages without navigating to a separate results page.

Search results page

For more comprehensive search results, hitting Enter or clicking the search icon takes you to a full-screen search results page.

The page summary provides additional details about a specific page to help you understand it better:

Where the content comes from (e.g., Cloud Fax or Enterprise SMS in the image above).
What the page is called.
A snippet of the page that contains the search term(s) in bold.

Each page displays up to ten results. If there are more results, you can find them on subsequent pages using the pagination feature. Simply click on the numbers and arrows provided to move forward or backward between results pages.

Filters on the search results page allow you to narrow down your search by choosing the desired product.

Search Limitations

Currently, the Product Documentation Center search does not support the following features.

Quoted search

The search ignores quotes and treats the entered phrase as separate words.

Example
If you type "send email" in the search bar, the search will look for matches with both "send" and "email" separately, so you may see results that contain either term anywhere in the Documentation Center.

Partial search

When you type a word into a search box, the search only finds pages with that exact word. It won't show you any pages with similar words.

Example
If you search for "install," you won't see pages that contain "installation" or "installing."

So, if you don't get the results you want, try searching for different forms of the word to see if you get more helpful information.