Unable to find articles in Search Results

Problem Statement

What could be the possible reasons for not finding the article/s in the search results?

Solution

Any of the below is a possible reason for an article not showing up in the search results:

1. Incorrect Data Category Tagged- The article is not tagged to a data category correctly. Data categories can be assigned when an article is created.

2. Permission issues- The user might not have the permissions required to access the article.
3. Crawling issue- The article has not yet been crawled and it's not available in the index. It happens when an article is newly published and crawling hasn't taken place after this addition. It will not be available in the search index in this scenario.

NOTE: Make sure all original and redirected URLs are crawled separately for them to appear in the search index.

To trigger recrawl and check the logs and status of crawling please refer to the below docs

https://docs.searchunify.com/Content/Content-Sources/Recrawl.htm
https://docs.searchunify.com/Content/Content-Sources/Status.htm
https://docs.searchunify.com/Content/Content-Sources/Crawl-Logs.htm

To check if an article is present in the index, please follow below steps:

a) Click the document counts for a given content source.



b) Select the date range when an article is crawled in SearchUnify index.
c) Search the article using a search box.

4. Stopwords- Keywords used to search the particular article/s are included in the stopwords section (NLP Manager > Manage Stopwords) in SearchUnify Admin.
5. Advanced Search is performed- # used before the search query. Example "And" operator. The search ends up with no results due to these operators.
6. Exclude List- Articles are not filtered in "Create Formula" options under Search client configurations in the Admin portal.
7. Facet Selection- For the selected facets, the article/s in question isn't available.
8. Missing content URLs in the sitemap XML - Sitemap XML needs to have all the content URLs to make sure SU crawlers are indexing all the content. Please review your sitemaps for missing content URL.
9. Content Source Upgrade- Sometimes after the content source upgrade, auto crawlers fail to index the new content even though it is made searchable in the admin panel. Users are advised to manually recrawl the content source and see if missing content appears in search results.
10. Frequency set to Never - If the frequency of crawl is set to never, new content will not be auto crawled, and hence some content will be unavailable in the search results. To set the frequency please follow the below steps:
    https://docs.searchunify.com/Content/Content-Sources/Edit.htm#!#SetUpCrawlFrequency
11. Missing Keyword in any of the Content Sources - Please make sure the keyword that you are searching for is present in one of the content sources. Searchunify also allows you to partially search a keyword by appending #* at the beginning. For Example: If the exact keyword "CENG-50196" is not present in any of the content sources, you can partially search #*50196 to return all results that contain 50196.
12. Disallowed Pages - If an article exists in the list of disallowed pages, crawlers will not index those pages. Please check the list of pages that are disallowed for indexing. Generally, customers maintain robot.txt file to maintain list of disallowed pages.
13. URL present in Should not crawl list - For website type of Content Sources, make sure URL is not present in the "Should Not Crawl" list. Below are the steps to verify the same:
    a. Edit a website type content source and go to Rules Tab.
    b. Under filter tab, check "Should not crawl" list to ensure website URL is not present.

14. Field not added in admin panel - If a new field is added to the content metadata to an existing content source in the SU admin panel, the field needs to be added to the SU object and made searchable by following the below steps:
    a. Open SU object where the field needs to be added
    
    b. Add the metadata field with a label for the object and click save.
    
    c. Make the field searchable