--- title: "How does search work in Improved Self Help?" slug: "how-does-search-work" updated: 2025-05-24T14:52:56Z published: 2025-05-24T14:52:56Z --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://support.whatfix.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # How does search work in Improved Self Help? When your end user searches for content in Explorer, the search term undergoes a series of algorithmic processes (described in the following article) to display the most relevant content. ### Step 1: Analysis of the search phrase As soon as you enter the search term, it is analyzed, and **stop words** such as **a, at, be, but, by, for,** and more are removed. Stop words do not impact the search results. Note: The list of stop words ignored are **a, an, and, are, as, at, be, but, by, for, if, in, into, is, it, no, not, of, on, or, such, that, the, their, then, there, these, they, this, to, was, will, with**. Once the stop words are removed, the search phrase is analyzed to find the exact match of the entered term using the **EXACT match process**. The content found as exact matches displays at the top of the search result. For example: Searching for the word 'creating' yields content with the exact word used in the following titles: - Creating Link - Creating a Flow - Creating a Tag ### Step 2: Stemming After analyzing the search term, it is reduced to its root form using a process called **Stemming**. This process ensures the search word returns relevant matches to the content, increasing retrieval accuracy. Stemming is a technique used to extract the base form of words by removing affixes from them. For Example: - **creating** after stemming is **creat** - **opportunities** after stemming is **opportunit** Even though there is no word called creat, it's that part of the word that is found in all variations of the word. Create, creating, created - all have **creat** in them. Thus, someone searching for any form of the word finds all content that uses any variation of the word. ### Step 3: Organizing the Results Once the search phrase is analyzed, Whatfix stores it in three variations - **Shingles**, **Root Word**, and **Keyword**. They are organized in such a way as to help in displaying the most relevant results first to the user. The term **creating leads in salesforce** after stemming becomes **creat lead salesforce** and is organized as, | Term | Variation | | --- | --- | | Creat lead | Shingles | | lead salesforce | Shingles | | creating | Keyword | | leads | Keyword | | salesforce | Keyword | | creat | Root word | | lead | Root word | | salesforce | Root word | Whenever you create content in Whatfix, it is immediately analyzed and organized in our database. This helps in reducing the processing time during the search. ### Step 4: Comparison of Search Phrase and your Content The search phrase and the Whatfix content (Flow, Video, Link, and more) are compared and mapped. Note: - Terms in both the title and the body of the content are considered during the comparison. However, if the term is found in the title, it is given a higher weightage. - In the case of Whatfix videos, only the terms in the title of the video are considered during a comparison. For example: The term **lead** appears in content1, content3, content6… The term **creat** appears in content2, content3, content9… so on and so forth. ### Step 5: Boosting To determine which content appears first in the search results, Whatfix assigns a boosting score to each content. This score depends on how often and where the analyzed terms appear in the content. For example, if the word **creat** appears in the description of flow1 and the title of flow2. Then, flow2 appears first in the search result. This is because the title of the content (Flow, Video, Link, and more) has a higher weightage compared to the step title or description. The weightage is applied in the following hierarchy. **Name of your Flow > Search Keywords > Describe your Flow > Purpose of this step > Describe the step action** The weightage for term variations are as follows: **Shingles > Keyword > Root word** This process is called **Boosting**. ### Step 6: Displaying the Result Once the search phrase is compared with the Whatfix content and scored, the highest-scored content displays first. For example, assume your Explorer segment contains the following content: - Creating a lead - Deleting a lead - What are leads in Salesforce? - Editing account info - Changing user roles and permission in Salesforce If the search phrase is **create lead in salesforce**, the following will be the search results in order: - Creating a lead - What are leads in Salesforce? - Deleting a lead - Changing user roles and permission in Salesforce --- ## Languages supported in Explorer Search The Explorer search supports all the languages that Whatfix supports. However, the optimization of stop words and the stemming process apply only to the following languages: - English - German - Spanish - Portuguese-Brazil - Italian - French - Norwegian - Dutch --- ## Search History and Suggestions in Explorer Search - Whatfix retains the 5 most recently viewed pieces of content for each end user in Explorer. This means the end user can see their personal search history and easily revisit the content they've previously interacted with. - The recently viewed content keeps getting updated as the end user consumes the Whatfix content. - End users can see the last seen content first in the search history. - This is visible to the end users for 90 days or until the browser cache is cleared; whichever happens earlier. - To enhance the search experience, Whatfix uses a matching ability that suggests relevant content even when the search term is incomplete. - Whatfix also suggests the right search results if the search query is misspelled or mistyped. These suggestions appear only if there is content with an alternative search term mapped to Explorer. In search indexing, shingles are sequences of adjacent words or terms extracted from a search phrase. They help Whatfix understand the context and order of words, improving the relevance of search results. Example: For the phrase**create lead in Salesforce**, the shingles are: - create lead - lead in - in Salesforce