Regular Website User Guide

5 Steps to follow

1. Create an account on SearchIQ from our signup page.

2. Once you’ve created an account, you can login to the SearchIQ dashboard.

3. After that, you can start indexing your site. To index your site, you can follow the “Indexing” section below.

4. After your site is indexed, you can setup search bar/result page and install SearchIQ tag to the header of all your webpages. For detailed, you can follow the “Setup” section below.

5. After that steps above, your site should be good to go. If you like to customize our autocomplete and result page, you can check out the “Customization” section below.

3.1 Setup Search Bar

SearchIQ will detect and see if your page has a search bar and associate our autocomplete widget to it. However, there are chances that we cannot detect your search bar correctly and you may not see the autocomplete appeared. If you come across this issue, you can inspect some properties from your search bar’s html code and fill up the info on our admin screen. Take the following search bar html snippet as an example.

<input type=”text” value=”Type keywords…” name=”q” id=”s” autocomplete=”off” data-default=”Type keywords…” class=”searchBox”>

You can see the search bar as a html form input element that has id and name. Enter the name and id on “Interface > General Tab” like below:

3.2 Setup search result page

You need to specify the URL for the search result page under “Interface > Result Page”. For the URL you want to be the result page, please tell us where you want us to show the search result widget via add the following html tag to the right position of the page.

<div id="siq_search_results"></div>

3.3 Install SearchIQ Javascript to your site

After site indexing and configuration, you are ready to see SearchIQ in action on your site. All you need to do is to install our SearchIQ tag to the header of your html pages. You can find the tag under “Interface > Installation” tab.

4.1 Autocomplete and Result Page

If you have SearchIQ set up properly, you should be able to see our autocomplete and result page below. If you don’t have search bar or autocomplete is not showing up in your search bar when you type, you can follow the “Setup Your Search Bar” section of this Guide to fix it. For autocomplete, we will show title, description and thumbnail by default. If you are using our cross-domain feature, you will see the domain name as well. For details about cross domain search, you can consult our “Cross Domain Search” Section below. Along with search result, there is thumbnail. For Free account, SearchIQ will generate thumbnails in your server and serve from there. For our paid users, thumbnails are generated and hosted on SearchIQ servers and deliver through CDN for better performance and user experience.

Autocomplete

Result Page

4.2 Match Option

By default, SearchIQ will return search results based on both relevancy and recency. For a particular user query, our engine will first decide what posts are relevant and rank them based on relevancy score with recency taken into consideration. That is to say, if posts are similar in relevancy, we will rank the latest one higher.

In term of search relevancy, by default, SearchIQ will use Broad Match. That is one of the match options that tries to boost up the search coverage by identifying content that has some terms matching the query regardless the word order and form. If you want the match be more restrictive, you can try other matching options like “Full term match” and “Phrase match”.

4.3 Fine-tune the result ranking

a) Field Weight

There are times you want to have better control the result ranking like you want our search engine gives higher priority to the posts the has a title match than description match. To address this need, SearchIQ provides you a field weight control page under “Documents” menu tab that you can go there to adjust the weight at the field level with 10 the highest weight and 0 if you want to ignore.

b) Control what posts to show by user query

If you want to have even more fine-grained control like you want to show a post at the top of the search result for a particular user query, you can achieve this by adding the user query as a tag to your post and give “Tag” field a high weight like 9 to 10 and potentially lower the “Title” weight. This feature may not allow you to explicitly decide what rank #2, #3 and so on but it allows you to show a set of posts for a particular query.

c) Custom sorting (Upcoming!)

SearchIQ will provide custom sorting feature shortly. With this feature, you can do multi-field sorting. For example, if you want the matching content ranked by popularity first and recency next, you can do it in our UI given the popularity field and post date are indexed.

5.1 Analytic Dashboard

SearchIQ tracks what your users searches and clicks on your site and provides you analytic reports. To access your domain reports, login in to SearchIQ admin area, select your domain, and click the Analytics on the left sidebar.

In the analytic dashboard, you can see # of searches, # of autocomplete click and # of result page click for your users within a time range you selected. For free account, you can examine the data for the last 24 hours. For larger time range, please consider to upgrade your account. SearchIQ provides both mobile and desktop analytics. You can select view them as a whole under “Traffic: All” or individually. The reports that our users use the most are “Top Search Terms” and “Top Terms with no result” sections. For the “Top Searches Terms” section, you can find out what kinds of content your users expecting from your site. So, you are followed the demand to deliver the content your users interested. For “Top terms with no results” section, you can see if you are really missing out some opportunities there or some search terms are not appeared in your content but you have written about. For latter, you can use our “Synonym” section to fix it. For example, if user search on apparel with brand “A&F” but your product title and description only use the full name “Abercrombie”, it may not come up as a match. If you see “A&F” in your “Top terms with no results” section, you can go to Documents > Synonym Section and add the synonym “Abercrombie, A&F”. This way you are teaching our search engine that they are the same in meaning so next time when user types A&F in search query, Abercrombie products will be shown up in the search result.

5.2 Export the Data

SearchIQ dashboard only shows you top 10 on each analytic section. If you want to obtain a bigger list up to 1000, you can click our “Export” button and download the report data in csv format.

Faceted search is the dynamic clustering of items or search results into categories that let users drill into search results (or even skip searching entirely) by any value in any field. Each facet displayed also shows the number of hits within the search that match that category. Users can then “drill down” by applying specific constraints to the search results. User studies demonstrate that faceted search provides more effective information-seeking support to users than best-first search. Indeed, faceted search has become increasingly prevalent in online information access systems, particularly for e-commerce and site search. That is why many of the large websites like Amazon already provide this feature to their users. You can enable the facets on autocomplete and result page from the SearchIQ dashboard.

Below you can see our faceted search in action on articles and products.

Apart from the autocomplete, you can turn on facet on result page as well. With grid layout, you can basically use this feature to create a catalog for your website. See an example below:

7.1 Customize autocomplete and result page

SearchIQ provides WYSIWYG configuration for both autocomplete and result page widget. SearchIQ provides a great set of elements that you can use to customize our widgets.

Autocomplete configuration page

Result page configuration page

7.2 CSS Override

If these configuration setting is not enough for you to customize our widget, you can use CSS Override under “General” tab and override our css rules for the widgets.