KB User's Guide - General Info - KnowledgeBase Search Tips

This document gives an overview of how to effectively use the Search function in the KB Live Site(s).

Search Field text Box

To find a document in your Live Site:

Enter one or more keywords into the text box, separating each word with a space.

You will notice that as you are typing, small text will appear above the text box telling you how many results you should expect using the current terms.

In the image below, the user has typed the first three letters in the word email. The whole word email appears in the dropdown menu and can be selected. The Quick Results count appears over the Search box in smaller font indicating that there are 4 documents where email is a keyword will appear.

Click on the Search button or press the Enter button on your keyboard.

If your search yields more than 20 documents, a limit dropdown menu will appear. You may select anywhere from 20 to 100 documents to appear on a page.

(Example, if 38 documents appear after performing a search, you may select 40 per page from the dropdown so every result will appear on one page. This feature is helpful if you are scanning for a specific Title.

If your search yields more than 100 results, perhaps you could refine your search by adding/ removing search terms.

Best Practices to Search Efficiently

No need to enter words that are already in the document title as they are automatically considered keywords
Use descriptive and specific keywords
Check that words are correctly spelled
Avoid unnecessary punctuation
If a single word yields too many unrelated topics, try adding another word or two.
You may also use the drop down menu to limit your search to one specific topic.
For an exact match, try using a phrase and enclose the phrase in quotation marks.
If you want to exclude documents that contain a certain keyword, focus your search by putting a minus sign ("-") in front of that word.
(example: For example, classlist -learn will find classlist documents that are not related to Learn@UW.)

Using the Advanced Search Options

If the standard search doesn't help, click on the Advanced button and try our Advanced Search Options. This feature allows you to further tailor your query parameters to your needs.

Methods of Searching

After you enter selected keywords into the search field text box, a list of relevant documents will appear found within your own KB site. Links around the document results table also lead to documents elsewhere that may be helpful to your current search.

Relevant Topics Filter

The Relevant Topics Filter link is located on the top left of your search results, "Show relevant topics filter".

Upon clicking on that link, you will be presented with all the matching relevant topics in that specific KB Site. In the image below, one of the options is Documents Tab (2). This indicates that a document with the search term email is assigned the topic called Documents Tab.

Clicking on that link or checking the box will lead you to a results table displaying the relevant documents in that specific topic. In the image below, the Recent Features topic has been selected. To return to all the results, click on the All matching link in the top left.

The Unified Site

When searching an external Live Site, you will see a link below the search results table of your original keyword search. The link is called See UW-Madison Unified KnowledgeBase with the number of available documents relevant to your keyword search within the parentheses. The image below shows that 853 documents in Unified site are relevant to the original keyword search of email.

Search partner public sites

When searching an external or internal Live Site, the link, Search partner public sites, appears at the bottom left of the screen. If you click on that link, 5 linked and bulleted documents relevant to your original keyword search will appear . You may click the link at the bottom of that window to show the remaining documents, again in a bulleted list of linked documents .

Search other internal sites

When searching an internal Live Site, the link, Search other internal sites, appears at the bottom left of the screen. If you click on that link, Cross site search results relevant to your original keyword search will appear . You may also click on the last link in all the links to Search the Unified KB.

If you've exhausted our tips and you still can't find what you're looking for, please feel free to contact us.