Search Engine Configuration

Library Administrators can configure search engine settings, view search engine status, files that cannot be indexed files, and errors.

Search Engine Settings

Use the Search Engine settings to configure how you want the search feature to return data.

WARNING: Changing the search engine settings can dramatically affect system search performance. If you make any changes please note the previous settings and document your changes. Please read carefully all examples within this area. We recommend populating and using the system for a period of time before making major adjustments.

To configure search engine settings

1. Go to Library Admin > Search Engine > Settings.

2. In the Search Result Metadata Weighting area, select the weighting of how strongly you want the metadata to influence the search results on a scale of 1 to 10. A selection of 1 puts more weighting on the content in the documents and a selection of 10 puts more weighting on the metadata. The suggested setting is 3 if you have strong metadata capture set in your schemas.

3. In the Number of Files to Return area, enter the number of files to return from a search. The default number is 5,000.

4. In the Stop Searching After area, enter the number of files to halt the search after the maximum number of files have been returned. For example, if the maximum number of files to return is set to 1,000 and the stop search is set to 5,000, the search will proceed until 5,000 files are found and the best matching of the 1,000 will be shown in the search results. The default number is 5,000. We recommend that you set this number to 500,000.

5. In the Search Timeout area, enter the time, in seconds, to terminate a search. This prevents server overload. The default is 60 seconds.

6. In the Stemmed Search area, select the check box if you want to use stemmed searching. Stemming finds other grammatical forms of the words in your search request. For example, a search for “applies” would also find “apply”.

7. In the Phonic Search area, select the check box if you want to use phonetically similar words. For example, Smith and Smythe.

8. In the Fuzzy Search Setting, select the check box if you want to enable fuzzy searching. Select a fuzzy search level from 1 to 10. Fuzzy search sifts through scanning and typographical errors. For example, a search for “alphabet” would find “alphaqet” with a fuzzy level of 1. A fuzzy level of 4 would find both “alphaqet” and “alpkaqet.” Fuzzy search requires additional computational overhead so it is suggested to keep this setting less than 5 unless the documents in the library and metadata have frequent spelling errors. The recommended level is 2.

   WARNING: We do not recommend using Stemmed Search, Phonic Search, Fuzzy Searching, nor Synonym searching for the vast majority of customers. They may change your search results wildly and should only be enabled in consultation with FileHold support support@filehold.com.

9. In the Synonym Searching area, select the check boxes to search for synonyms or related words.

10. In the Hyphen Searching area, you can set how hyphen characters are indexed and searched. Select from the following options:

• Hyphen as ignore — Does not index the hyphen. For example, “first-class” will be indexed as “firstclass”.

• Hyphen as a hyphen — Indexes the hyphen. For example, “first-class” will be indexed as “first-class”.

• Hyphen as a space — Separates the hyphenated words into two words. For example, “first-class” will be indexed as “first” and “class”.

• Hyphen all — Indexes a hyphen as all three of the above options.

  WARNING: Changing hypen settings will cause reinitialization of the full text search index and schedule reindexing of all documents. This should be done only after work hours as the search system will not function while this occurs.

11. In the Accent Support area, select the check box if you want indexing to be sensitive to accents. An accent-sensitive index converts characters, wherever possible, to a “base” character which is the letter A to Z or 0 to 9. Generally, accent-insensitive indexes are easier to use because they ensure that a document will be found even if the user omitted an accent when typing a word. In accent-sensitive indexes, each letter is converted to lower case where possible but otherwise characters re-indexed using their Unicode values. For example, e and é would be considered different letters and a search would not find the other.

    WARNING: Changing accent settings will cause reinitialization of the full text search index and schedule reindexing of all documents. This should be done only after work hours as the search system will not function while this occurs. You generally do not need to use accent settings when managing English language documents.

12. In the Error Email Addresses area, select the groups of users that will receive a daily email with a summary of search engine warnings and errors.

13. In the Type of Errors to Send area, select the type of events that administrators want to be notified about:

• Index Errors Only

• Un-indexed Files Only

• Both Un-indexed and Index Errors

• None

14. In the Initialize Index area, click Initialize Index to start full-text search indexing.

    WARNING: Use this feature only when absolutely necessary. This will wipe out the existing Full Text Search collection and create a queue for all documents in the system to be reindexed in the Microsoft SQL Databases. On large collections, this may also interfere with documents being added to the system by FileHold users. This task takes considerable time and is only recommended if there are significant reasons for re-indexing the entire system. We recommend this be run over the weekend. Before doing this you should ensure an IT Administrator is available in case server changes are needed. The scheduled task runs this process, and an IT server administrator can disable this scheduled task (Update FTS index) during business hours. This process may take minutes or hours or longer - it depends on whether you have tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands or in millions of documents in your collection. Contact FileHold support if you have any questions. For rebuilding the search index, see Rebuilding the Full Text Search Index.

15. Click Update to update the search engine settings.

16. Click Restore Default to revert the settings to their default values.

NOTE: Most of the settings on this page impact the performance of full text searching only and do not impact the searching using the advanced search metadata string searches.

See Also:

Rebuilding the Full Text Search

Search Engine Status

Un-indexed Files

Search Engine Errors