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.

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,

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.

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.