SDP uses Elastic App Search for site search.
In our Elastic App Search installation 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, so they’re not super useful.
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. For our rollout let’s nominate the best 3 pages per search term.
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 and after.
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.
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