Filtering by Section in Search Results

Hi @Chris Dunderdale,

Do you mean that you want the section to take up a complete search result? In my mind, a section is part of the taxonomy of an article, but it's the article that users want to actually find.

The section does appear in the breadcrums of the search results.

377839746313 apologies if what I said isn't clear! Say I search for XYZ using the default search bar. I'm able to see articles that were hit. Additionally, the applicable categories are also found (in what I assume you're referring to as bread crumbs?), but not the sections.

i.e. in my opinion users should see "By Type", "By Category" and "By Section"

Attaching a screenshot below.

Ah, I see now. Actually what I meant by breadcrumb was on (usually below) the result item itself:

But what you're asking for seems to be Filtering by section. I think that's a good piece of feedback and aligned with our general direction for the search page. I will update the title of your post just to make sure it fits the wording we would use for this type of feature.

Perfect - thanks so much!

+1 for this feature. And if a workaround is available, I would love to hear it

+1 for this feature. And if a workaround is available, I would love to hear it. It would be most useful for a large knowledge base like ours.

+1 for this feature. We are very interested in using our sections to define all of the pieces of a group of applications we offer. 

We have three major categories that we offer applications for "In the Trade, In the Office, In the Warehouse" We would like to make these three categories and then have the applications or tasks be sections of one or more of them. Allowing customer the ability to search for "receiving" and then decide do they want to see how to do that "in the warehouse" vs "in the office" would be fantastic. The biggest complaint we have right now is customers can't find what they need in our current KB. Filters help them find the path that works best for them.

+1 for this feature. Like Shana, our major categories are a bit broad, so filtering by Section would be a lot more useful.

+1 for this feature

Hi everyone,

I wanted to provide a quick update on this thread. We do not currently have any plans to add sections to the search results in Help Center search. However, we have been releasing a number of features in the past year related to Federated Search and the ability to control your search index with External Content. Actually it is entirely possible (although requires using our REST API for external content) to set up the search index so that you index your section pages as "external content records".

I realize this is not an easy point'n'click solution to your problem, but I wanted to let you know of the alternative that is available today.

Adding another +1 for this feature.

We have 3 categories for different products in our Help Center and each category has multiple sections. We've received many customer complaints that they cannot filter their searches before submitting them and they find using the category filters in a long list of results confusing.

+1 for this feature

In our environment, filtering is needed to allow clientele to self-service to find the information necessary for Release upgrades. In preparation for an upgrade from Release X to Release Y, this would allow clientele to filter out the pertinent articles/information without utilizing internal resources from Change Management, Relationship Management, Product, and/or Release Management. The self-service benefit will allow clients to obtain the information quickly as a best in class service.

For example, if a client is upgrading from Release X to Release Y, filtering would allow the client to easily determine which features or functionality would be included as part of their upgrade across various releases. This would save internal teams roughly 2-3 hours per upgrade. There are approximately 40 upgrades per year. Therefore, the estimated time saved annually is 80 to 120 hours to our internal teams.

Our idea is to ensure that end-users have filter available during their searches, to easily identify the content that they are looking for.

Other valid filtes would also be:

- By creation date (newer to older - older to newer)
- By Last update date (newer to older - older to newer)
- By relevance (We are using tags but as we have multiple articles using similar tags the other 2 filter above would be helpful)

+1 for this feature

+1 for this feature.

In our use case, we want to exclude content that is located in specific Categories from being included in any Guide searches.

Adding my vote for this. Being able to filter by section (even if by just one level—no nested subsections) would be valuable. We organize content for different products by category, so users can easily filter to see only the articles that apply to the product they have questions about. But then they have to hope their query gets them close enough to the right article, because there's no way to further winnow down to the relevant results.

Just adding another +1 that this is needed. Currently, I am using weird code workarounds to automatically filter by “Articles” so that Categories show up by default for users to select from, but would be awesome to have real filters we could implement like most websites have had standard for many years. Users are used to this typical functionality so meeting them where they are at would be ideal for a good support experience.