Content Search Settings

On the General tab of Search Settings, the Content Search settings appear on every project. On an ecommerce project the tab also shows a Product Search block, and the Spam Filter is a separate section.

Language​

Sets the language used for indexing and query processing your site content. This does not change the language of your search interface — set that in the Design & Publish interface.

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Spelling Correction​

Site Search 360 includes a built-in spelling correction feature to help users find relevant results even if their query contains typos. Each part of the query is compared against a dictionary of known words, and the most frequent alternative spelling is chosen when needed.

It works in the background and requires no setup — it is enabled by default. You can disable it here.

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Allow Bot Searches​

When enabled, bots such as Googlebot can execute search requests by visiting linked search result pages. All bot queries count against your query quota and appear in your analytics.

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Content Search Fuzziness​

"Fuzzy search" or "fuzziness" refers to search algorithms that find results matching the original search terms closely, but not exactly. How closely the results match depends on how fuzzy the search is.

Two sliders control this:

• Search Suggestion Fuzziness — the relevance of your search suggestions (autocomplete / search-as-you-type results).
• Search Fuzziness — the relevance of your search results (triggered by pressing enter or the search button).

On ecommerce projects, the search-results slider is labeled General Search Fuzziness and an additional Number Search Fuzziness control appears — see Product Search Fuzziness. You can compare any level instantly in the Search Preview.

The sliders offer six levels, from strictest to loosest:

Level	Term logic	Minimum match	Notes
Extremely strict	AND — all terms present	100%	Terms must appear in the exact order: "latest fashion trend" does not match "latest trend".
Strict	AND — all terms present	≥90%	—
Default	OR — any term present	≥90%	Splits queries like iphone8 into iphone 8 when nothing is found, then tries fuzzier matches.
More results	OR — any term present	≥50%	—
Even more results	OR — any term present	≥40%	—
Get most results	Any related term	—	Shows all results at least slightly related to the query.

Regardless of the level, the best-matching results are always shown at the top — the level is about how many results are returned even when they don't fully match. The difference between levels is often unnoticeable for single-word queries ("mittens", "payment") but becomes apparent with multi-word queries ("women ski mittens").

Under Show Advanced Settings, you can also set Title Boost, Content Boost, and Data Point Boost to weight how heavily each field influences ranking.

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Search Suggestions​

Fine-tune what shows up in search suggestions — the autocomplete / search-as-you-type results that appear under the search box before a search is run. There are a few ways to change your search suggestions.

• Adjust your search suggestion fuzziness.

• Restrict suggestions to only derive from page titles.

  

  Checking this box means only pages that have the search term in the title will be shown in the search suggestions. If the search term is only found in the page's content, it will not be shown.

  For example, imagine you have a series of products called "Travelr." When your customers type "travel" in your search box, you may only want to prompt them with the "Travelr" product pages, and ignore all other pages that mention, let's say, travel budgeting.

• Restrict your suggestions to a specific Result Group using the data-ss360-include-suggestion / data-ss360-exclude-suggestion attributes on your search box. See Result Groups for the full attribute reference. If the same restrictions should apply to full search results as well, use the data-ss360-include or data-ss360-exclude attributes instead.

• Improve title extraction from your pages. By default, the first h1 header on your page (//h1) is taken as the title that comes up in search suggestions and results. However, you can point the crawler to any part of a page by adjusting the Title XPath under Data Structuring → Content Extraction. Read more about perfecting your search result titles.

• Upload your own list of search suggestions or turn on automatically suggested popular queries — see Autocomplete Queries.

Keep in mind that you can also use the Search Designer to tweak your search suggestions. Customization options extend to both empty state and query-based suggestions, meaning that specific pages and/or search keywords can be brought to your site visitors' attention when the search box is empty as well as when the first few characters of the query are typed into it.

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Search Snippet​

Control where the text shown under each search result comes from, using the Search Snippet Source setting.

You can choose from:

• Content around the search query (default).
• First sentences of the indexed content.
• A specific area of the website that you determine via XPath.
• No snippet at all (titles and URLs will still be shown).

If you want to use meta descriptions in your snippets, select Use content behind search snippet XPath and save. By default, the crawler already indexes meta descriptions with this XPath: //meta[@name="description"]/@content

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Protect Search Endpoints​

This is the Access Control section on the General tab. It addresses a potential security risk for intranet and extranet projects.

If your search endpoints are publicly accessible, anyone who knows — or can guess — a valid siteId could query the Search and Suggestion endpoints directly and retrieve indexed results. This means your content may be exposed through the API even if your website itself is not publicly accessible.

Enabling Protect Search Endpoints mitigates this risk by requiring authorization on all search and suggestion requests.

Require API Key Authentication​

When enabled, all Search and Suggestion endpoint requests must include a valid API key.

You can pass the API key in either of the following ways:

• As a query parameter: token=<your-api-key>
• As a request header: Authorization: <your-api-key>

Restrict by Allowed Host Names​

Only Search and Suggestion requests originating from the specified host names will be accepted. Leave this field blank to allow requests from all host names.