How our website search works

Search is complicated for us, because we have a lot of content/events/groups, often with overlapping names, and have competing priorities about what we rank higher in the results (e.g. boosting upcoming events versus directing straight to how-to guides for a keyword). 

This guide helps you understand what gets prioritised and how you can make sure your content shows for the right keywords. 

What can be found via search?

The search searches the title and body text of this content:

• Student groups
• Upcoming events, i.e. excluding past events (which you can still find as Union staff via Content -> Events, or as a ticket holder via your profile page, or via Google for up to 3 months if needed)
• Pages including how-to articles, news, blogs and landing pages, excluding news articles older than 3 months, pages not updated in 2 years
• Webform pages (i.e. webforms with associated pages, not all webforms)

We exclude any content not updated in 4 years.

How are results prioritised?

The search term is used as the initial filter. As part of that, results with the term in the title are boosted more than those just having it in their body content. Note the search term does do "stemming" with basic English, so "dance" and "dancing" would be considered the same search. 

Assuming an equal match to the search term, the search orders the results in this rough order:

• Landing pages / reports
• Upcoming events
• Groups
• Products
• All other content

But different content will match the search term differently so this is not going to be the case 100% of the time.

In all cases, recently updated content is boosted over older content.

Recommendations for search optimisation

• Check your content regularly and either:
  • update it (to make sure it's still correct, which the search results will reward you for)
  • unpublish or delete it (because it's showing up and shouldn't be, e.g. out of date)
• Consider adding "unpublish landing pages and other content" to the end of any event or project plans that involve creating information that is not intended to be available forever, or might be confusing for users to find at other times of year.
• Try searching keywords related to your area frequently to check what's coming up and tweak accordingly
• When creating content, ensure you include minimum context in the title, e.g. use "Active Bystander FAQs" not just "FAQs", or "TeamUCL Gym opening hours" instead of "Opening hours". This is important for two reasons:
  • It helps match to the keywords more strongly
  • Visitors are often finding pages via search out of the menu context (e.g. in Google search results) and it can be confusing for them
• Use the "News" page type where you can, to ensure that temporary information does not clutter search results (e.g use news to post that Phineas bar will be closed over summer, so that the system automatically hides that result by the time people are searching "phineas" in September).
• Create webform pages for webforms you want to be searchable.