When you search in the platform, the search engine searches for matches in a variety of different places across the platform:

• Pages
• News Channels
• News Posts
• Plugin titles
• Files added to News and Pages
• Employee Directory, if set up for your organization
• Launchpad apps, if set up for your organization
• Open group content, if set up for your organization
• Microsoft 365 contents, if set up for your organization

The search indexes the platform's contents, so that when you search, results can be quickly scanned and ranked. Direct matches to user names or post titles will be listed at the top of the search results, followed by other less direct matches. New and recently updated posts are also sorted with a high priority in your results list. Use the dropdown menus for sorting your search results, for example, by date or relevance.

The search function also allows for partial search. This means that if you begin typing a word, predictive results will begin to appear and be narrowed down with each letter you add. 

Apply filters to your search results to narrow your search and find content that is relevant to you.

Under the News tab, you can filter by:

• Channel: Select five most relevant channels
• Published by: Select five most relevant authors
• Date: Select a date range by providing from and to date

Under the Files tab, you can filter by:

• File Type: Select the type of files you want to be included in the search
• File Location: Select the location where the file is found in the platform
• Upload Date: Select a date range for when files were uploaded

Yes. Once you have searched for a term and selected a page from the search results page, a dialog will display at the bottom of the page prompting you to begin the on-page search.

If you want to see exactly where your search term appears on the page, click Show Results and all occurrences of your search term will be highlighted, so you can find them easily.

Yes, you can search for content within all text-based file types. When searching for the term Europe in the example below, the file displayed in the result is shown, even though the title does not contain the search term.

There could be a few reasons:

• Spelling and typos: Check your search term for typos or try alternative spellings and keywords for your search term.
• It could be that no content exists yet for the term you are searching for or that existing content has been deleted.
• If you’re searching something numerical, such as a phone number, be sure to use the appropriate formatting.
• Some content may only be available for specific device types.
• You may not have the required permissions to view certain content. 

Yes, as soon as new content is published in the platform, it will be immediately available in the search. 

Depending on the setup of your platform, using the search function often yields more results than navigating through the menu. Menus for mobile devices, for example, are often simplified to make menu navigation easier and less cluttered. It’s also possible for  you to find open group content, for groups that you are not a member of. Such ‘open content’ is then only accessible via search.  Depending on how your editors set up the menu, some contents may only be found by searching for them directly.

In the search results, a location path is displayed under the name of each piece of content. This shows where the content ‘lives’ as breadcrumbs. In this example, this post on sick day guidelines can be found under the menu item 'News' in the folder 'HR News'. 

If platform contents are available in multiple languages, you can use search terms from any available content language. Your results, however, will display in the content language you have selected for your profile, if available. In this example, the user has set English as their preferred content language. That is why the search results display in English, although the search term itself is in German.