What will I learn to do?
The search field on the public site:
The search field of the private area:
After a few months of existence, your SPIP website may be filled with a lot of articles and news items.
When there is a lot of content, retrieving a particular article or, for instance, all the articles addressing the same topic just by using the navigation menus can become difficult.
In this case, the site built-in search engine can be very useful.
In this lesson you will learn how to use the public search engine, as well as the private one; and how to understand the results.
How can I use the public search engine?
On the SPIP site you want to search, you will find a text field where you can enter key word(s) for the required search.
The administrator of your SPIP site may prefer not to have the public search engine available (for instance for performance issues) and disable it. In such a case,you won’t find any search field on the public site.
Type in your key word, then press enter
Results are displayed.
Search engine results are not necessarily limited to just articles. They can be extended to Forums or to News for example. For instance in the screenshot you can see that searching on the word "blogger" yield results in articles and also in news items.
Then, if you click on one of the result articles, you can see that the word you searched is highlighted everytime it appears in the article.
When you use the search engine, the search will usually only apply to the pages of the site.
This is not entirely true if the administrators have decided to extend the search function to the partners sites, linked by syndication: in this case the results will not only come from the site itself but also from the sites connected to it through syndication.
What do I need to know to read the results properly?
A search engine index is very similar in concept to that of an index found at the end of a book and for which a given word will return the list of pages where it can be found.
When one uses the public search engine, of course articles that are not published yet are not returned in the results.
In fact, when you use the public Search Engine the results display published elements which have been, we say, indexed.
Also, the order in which articles appear in the results depends on a weighing that is calculated in SPIP. If a word appears 15 times in an article and only twice in another, the first article will come up first in the search results.
Finally, by default SPIP performs the search on all the articles, whatever their language. But this configuration may be changed by your Administrator.
Search the word “women”
Can I type several words in the search field?
In you want to perform a search on two words in the public site, you must separate these two words with a comma or a space.
For instance "women, clinic"...
... or "police blogger".
The first results displayed in the list are the articles containing both words, if such articles exist, then articles containing at least one of the two words.
