Searchstax

What is Searchstax?

Searchstax is the service which provides our search functionality, Searchstax also provides various analytics and reporting options to give you information on what people are searching for and what kind of content is being searched. It also provides various logging and diagnostic reports to help fine-tune the system.

How can I access this?

You must request access to the data at webhelp@uark.edu and if you do not already have an account one will be made for you. Then you will proceed to the Searchstax login page to log in.

What can I do with this?

There are two sides to the funnelback interface, admin and marketing. Most of the relevant information will be found on the marketing side. There you can investigate what is being searched on the University website and which webpages users are landing on.

The general analytics view appears as below:

Promotions

Promoted results are search results that are forced to the top and are colored differently than the rest of the search results. These are used to ensure that high visibility and high importance results always surface to the top.

Promotions ignore the rest of the relevance modeling and can link to both internal and external sites. They can also be used for promotional purposes to promote a certain page or document based upon a user's query. A full explanation of promotions can be found at the SearchStax promotions page.

Synonyms

Synonyms are exactly what they sound like. They control how some queries are interpreted to match up with your our specific terminology, or to help with common misspellings.

Synonyms in Searchstax can be used to:

• expand a term into a set of equivalent terms. E.g. when somebody includes the word lawyer somewhere in a query also search for attorney or solicitor.
• expand acronyms. E.g. if query includes the term moj also search for ministry of justice
• map user language to internal language, or non-technical language to the equivalent technical terms. Users often don't know the exact technical words to use and this can prevent them from finding what they are looking for. E.g. map bird flu to H1N1.
• auto-correct known misspellings. E.g. if a query includes the word qinwa automatically replace this with quinoa.  Searchstax does include a spelling suggestion system, but synonyms can enhance the user experience by fixing a misspelling without a user needing to click on an extra did you mean link.

How do I submit a Promotion or Synonym?

To submit one of the above simply reach out to webhelp@uark.edu with your suggestion, or if there are multiple terms/rules you would like to consider we can set up a meeting to look through the dashboard and determine the best path forward.