Searching for Assets

As explained in the Search introduction, all indexed assets can be returned as search results. Since any developer can create their own assets, your Liferay DXP instance might have additional asset types beyond the ones that Liferay DXP ships with by default.

Searching for Users: When you click an asset in the search results, it’s displayed in an Asset Publisher (unless you use the View in Context option for the asset). Users are different, though. Think of them as invisible assets, not intended for display in the Asset Publisher application. While users appear as search results with other indexed assets, when you click one you’re taken to the user’s profile page. If public personal pages have been disabled, clicking on a user from the list of search results shows you a blank page.

Versioning Note: If there are multiple versions of the same content, the latest approved version is the only one searched.

Search Bar

The search bar is where users enter the search context. Users enter search terms, hit their Enter button (or click the magnifying glass icon), and they’re taken to a maximized view of the search portlet displaying any results and facets that apply.

Figure 1: The Search application displays just the search bar in its default view, beckoning users to enter the search context.

Entering Search Terms

Liferay DXP, backed by Elasticsearch, supports full text search. It does not, however, support advanced search syntax, such as Elasticsearch’s query string syntax. That means you can’t search specific fields, use wildcards like *, or boolean operators like AND/OR/NOT. Liferay is weighing the costs and benefits of enabling the use of string queries out of the box in a future version of Liferay DXP.

Prefix Searching

Prefix searching is cool. If you’re searching in a site for classical musicians, you might search for the term instrument. This search of course returns documents with the full word in them, but it also returns variants with instruments as the prefix. For example, results with instruments, instrumental, and instrumentation would also be returned.

Figure 2: Searching for *data* in Liferay DXP's Search application also returns *database*.

Another way to ensure users see results is using the spell check settings.

Spell Checking User Queries

Spell check settings allow administrators to configure the Search application so that if a user types a search term that doesn’t return many results (for example, a slightly misspelled werd), the user can be prompted to improve their search.

To configure the spell check settings, click the options () button and select Configuration. The tab displayed is Display Settings, and next to it is the Spell Check Settings tab. Here you can configure the Search application to help users when their initial query doesn’t yield many results.

Figure 3: Configure the spell check settings to allow for user input mistakes and help lead users to results.

There are three main settings here:

**Display “Did you mean…” if the number of search results does not meet the

threshold.**

Present users alternate, spell checked search queries if their search did not return a minimum number of results (50 by default).

Display Related Queries

Display up to a maximum number of alternative queries (5 by default) if the user’s query doesn’t return a minimum number of results (0 by default).

Add New Related Queries Based on Successful Queries

Index a user’s search query if it produces a minimum number of results (50 by default). If the Display Related Queries setting is enabled, it can be used as a related query for similar search queries that don’t produce enough results.

Note: To enable the spell checking behavior described above, you must first trigger a reindex of the spell check indexes. Navigate to the Control Panel → Configuration → Server Administration. Find the Index Actions entry for Reindex all spell check indexes. Click Execute, and look for a message in your log your indicating that the spell checking indexes were created successfully:

16:19:35,793 INFO  [liferay/search_writer/SYSTEM_ENGINE-24][BaseSpellCheckIndexWriter:257]
    Start indexing dictionary for com/liferay/portal/search/dependencies/spellchecker/en_US.txt
16:19:41,932 INFO  [liferay/search_writer/SYSTEM_ENGINE-24][BaseSpellCheckIndexWriter:2910]
    Finished indexing dictionary for com/liferay/portal/search/dependencies/spellchecker/en_US.txt

Once the spell checking indexes are created, your spell check settings become effective.

In addition to enabling or disabling the spell check settings, thresholds for all of the settings are changeable, to produce the desired behavior.