New search functionality

We've improved and extended search functionality for Mosaic websites

20 May 2020
Mosaic Team

In Release 4.0.6 we’re pleased to introduce new search functionality which makes it easier for site visitors to find relevant content on your site and elsewhere. You don’t need to do anything to keep your current site searches working; for most sites and users these changes will initially be an improvement rather than a radical departure.

The main changes which all sites will see are:

  • The files on your site are now indexed and returned in search results (this includes PDFs, docs, and other files containing text), provided they are referenced from other content with a system link. 

  • More context is now provided on the search results page around the ‘hits’ for your search term, to make it easier to see at a glance whether a result is relevant.

  • The look and feel of the search results page has been refreshed, within your site's theme settings.

If you were already using Shared search, this will continue to work with the sites you have already added; however, site visitors will see a slight change to the user interface:

  • the radio buttons below the search box for selecting the search scope (‘this site’/’all sites’) have been removed

  • instead, the search results page will feature tabs for the results from the different scopes (see example screenshot below)

In other words, your site visitors will no longer need to predict which collection will include the results they want, or repeat the search with a different scope if it proves unsuccessful, but instead can do a single search and see the different sets of results clearly grouped and labelled.

 

 

Smarter searching

We're also introducing completely new functionality which gives site owners the opportunity to create more powerful and flexible search paths.

New in this release:

  • External search allows you to connect your site visitors to an external search site (they submit their search on the Mosaic site and are then taken to the external site to view their results), e.g. visitors to the Bodleian website can also run their search on SOLO.

 

Planned for the next release:

  • Promoted search items let you present and highlight important information to site visitors in response to related keywords, even if those keywords don’t appear in the content, e.g. make sure visitors see up-to-date information about your department’s arrangements relating to COVID-19 when they search for ‘coronavirus’, ‘lockdown’ or ‘library opening hours’.

  • Section search lets site visitors search within subsets of content items or files on your site (e.g. all items within ‘Legislation’ on the Governance website). These subsets are defined using a new search taxonomy -- you’ll need to make a service request to enable this.

For more details, see the technical specification for the new search functionality: