How to improve site search (internal search)

SDP uses Elastic App Search for site search.

For vic.gov.au and other websites managed in content.vic.gov.au, the SDP content team looks after:

• synonyms

• curations

• relevance tuning

For information on improving your external search results (e.g. Google), see our guide on https://digital-vic.atlassian.net/servicedesk/customer/portal/23/article/2436073048.

Synonyms

Synonyms can only be single words. They can be useful for frequently used jargon or abbreviations, such as ‘kindy’ or ‘elc’ for ‘kinder’ (the term mainly used on vic.gov.au).

Curations

Curations are more powerful - we can nominate specific pages to come up at the top of site searches for a term. However, curations are also only for single words.

To identify the top user search terms for curations, you can look at the search tab on our Looker Studio dashboard.

If you’re requesting curations, it’s a great idea to take a screenshot or record in some way how your search terms were performing before the change so you and after.

How to request curations

Submit a support request with the following information:

• search term (single words only)

• your top 3 pages for this term

• the CMS link for these top 3 pages

Relevance tuning

This is a way of ranking the importance of specific fields in the CMS. The search engine will prioritise looking in those fields for the search term. For example, title and summary would be the top fields.

Once this has been set up there shouldn’t be any need to update this.