How WebSite X5's built-in Search Engine works

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How WebSite X5's built-in Search Engine works

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With the Search Object, WebSite X5 offers you the possibility of adding a search field to the Header / Footer of the template or as part of the page contents, so that your visitors can use the built-in Search Engine to look for things in your website. The engine will search pages, images, videos, products in the e-commerce shopping cart and the blog: the results of the search are ordered by relevance and displayed in pages created automatically by the Program.

Click to expand/collapseWhat does the Search Engine work on?

To get the most out of WebSite X5's built-in search engine you need to know that:

Pages

The items that the search engine considers in a page are the title, description and keywords (see the Page Properties | SEO window), as well as the text contents.

Images / Videos

The search engine only considers images and videos that have been added to the SiteMap (see Image Object | Sitemap or Video/Audio Object | Sitemap) and it analyzes all the information that has been given: Title, Caption and Geographical position (e.g. Address, Town, etc) for the images; Title, Caption, Category, WebSite Keywords and Publication Date for videos.

Products in the e-commerce shopping cart

The search engine extends its search to include all the products that have been added to the e-commerce shopping cart, analyzing the Name/Code and associated Description (see Product Settings | General).

Blog

All the pages in your blog are included in a search. The search engine analyzes the Title, Author, Category, Tag, Caption and Content of each Post.

Members' Area

The pages with login and password access (inside a Members' Area) are not considered by the search engine, unless the user has already logged in.

Hidden pages

Pages that are Hidden in the navigation menu are treated as normal pages for the purpose of the search.

To exclude a page from the search

If you want to exclude a page from a search, select it from the Map, open the Page Properties window and, in the Expert section, deselect the Add this page to the Sitemap option.

Uppercase/Lowercase

The search engine is not case-sensitive: it does not differentiate between upper and lowercase letters.

The various parameters that the search engine considers have different relevance: for example, the occurrences of elements in page titles are considered very relevant. Thus, the occurrences of some parameters are automatically multiplied by a correction factor before being associated with other occurrences. Depending on the number of occurrences, a element's relevance is calculated and it is positioned accordingly in the Search Results page.

Click to expand/collapseThe Search Results pages

The Search Results pages are created automatically by the Program and show:

the search field, which you see in the template's header or footer or as page content;
a side menu, where you can choose whether to display the results for pages, the blog, the e-commerce shopping cart, the images or the videos. Next to each item in this menu the number of results for it is given in brackets. If there are no results for a particular category, the item is not included in the menu;
the list of results of the search, ordered according to their calculated relevance.

Remember that, in pages showing the results of searches on images and videos, you can click directly on an image or video in the list to open it in the page where it has been inserted.

The built-in search engine is particularly useful for websites that have a rich product catalog: the Search Results pages not only give a complete description of the products, but also include the "Buy now" button so that visitors can immediately order online.

The Search Results pages are created automatically by the Program: the style of these pages is defined in Step 2 - Template Settings, in the Text Style section.