advanced search in WebHelp

[AJOwens]

Are there any plans to add support for boolean and exact-string searches in oXygen WebHelp?

[sorin_ristache]

Hello,

In the current version (14.2) and the next version (15.0) the Webhelp search supports only AND boolean searches and stemming of the search words. We will consider adding support in a future version for other types of boolean searches and for exact searches, but we have not planned this support yet.


Regards,
Sorin

[rdelong]

It's been nearly 2 years since a reply has been posted about enhanced search for WebHelp.

Have there been any improvements with Search? I noticed that the previous reply mentioned the addition of Boolean search capabilities. However, when I try this search, boot AND shoes, AND is included in the search results hits. Huh, what?? This tells me that perhaps Boolean is NOT supported.

I cannot find any information that describes how search is designed to work. Is there such resource? This information would be helpful for me to communicate to our readers (and reviewers) about search capabilities and limitations.

[sorin_ristache]

Hello,

Have there been any improvements with Search? I noticed that the previous reply mentioned the addition of Boolean search capabilities. However, when I try this search, boot AND shoes, AND is included in the search results hits. Huh, what?? This tells me that perhaps Boolean is NOT supported.

The AND keyword is implied which means the search finds all the pages that include all the search words without an explicit AND word being typed in the search box. This was true at the beginning of the WebHelp page format in Oxygen and it is still true.

Some minor improvements were added, for example a separator like -, or :, or . now results in both the combined word and the separate words being indexed as searchable words, like in byte-sized, byte and sized being all indexed as searchable terms. Also some minor bugs were fixed. However boolean search with explicit boolean words like AND, OR, NOT is not supported yet.

I cannot find any information that describes how search is designed to work. Is there such resource? This information would be helpful for me to communicate to our readers (and reviewers) about search capabilities and limitations.

The WebHelp search is described here. Basically it lists on the search results tab all the pages that include at least one word in the search expression, and ranks these pages based on the number of occurrences of each word and on the place of occurrence of each word (a meta keyword ranks highest, which is higher than a word found in the main title of a page, which ranks higher than a word in a bolded area of text in a paragraph, which ranks higher than a word in a plain text area in a regular paragraph).