Beginner's Guide

People expect to be able to search content on your website.

Joomla uses as the default setting full text search. Full text means that Joomla searches for all

keywords you enter in the search box directly in the database.

This may sound obvious to most people, but it isn't. Many search engines ﬁrst create a search index

consisting of words used on your website. During the actual search, the search index is browsed for

matches. These matches are linked to the actual content. The search result page is based on these

matches and links.

Index-based search is faster than full text search but the index has to be updated with every website

change; otherwise the new content cannot be found. In order to compensate for the performance

advantage of the index-based search function, Joomla is highly conﬁgurable.

Since Joomla 2.5 the new core component Smart Search offers an index based search.

Search Term Analysis

To get a a ﬁrst glimpse of what visitors are searching for on your site, you have to switch on the

statistics feature (Components → Search → Options: Gather Search Statistics - Yes). Then all the terms will be

recorded and listet in Components - Search. Don't forget to also switch on Show Search results (Figure 1).

Figure 1: Search statistics

User interface

You can choose7between a search box appearing7on various pages of your website or a link to a seach

form. The search extension provides a search module for the single box and a search layout for menu

items. The search module is activated by default and most templates provide a special search position for

it. It offers numerous7options, including7text conﬁguration of7the buttons7as well as setting7the box width.

One additional feature since Joomla 2.5 is the possibility to add a Joomla search to the browsers default

search. The Joomla search module offers the OpenSearch Format

(Figure 2).

Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide

Monday, 30 January 2012! Page 169

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSearch