Need help with understanding how discourse search works

Ranjan · December 15, 2020, 5:01am

Hi Team,

Wanted to know bit about how content gets priority in search.

So generally, the understanding is a Blog article gets searched via multiple keyword- tags related to the post.

E.g.
It can be keywords within the :
Question of the post , Topic title, Keywords within answer, Category tags for the question etc.

If my understanding is not complete…correct me.

Since our community is on Discourse platform, how does discourse implement search?
Are there different Discourse tags? different from tags that google uses to capture information?

What tags(Question of the post , Topic title, Keywords within answer, Category tags for the question ) would bring best search results for our community posts?

Please share your thoughts.

Thanks.

simon · December 16, 2020, 12:32am

Are you asking what Discourse does to allow the site to be searched by Google? If so, the best answer that I know of is in this post: Beginners guide to SEO with Discourse. There are additional details in the other posts in that topic.

One thing to note is that topic mentions the Discourse Sitemap plugin. As far as I know, search engines have no trouble indexing a Discourse site even when it doesn’t have a sitemap. The main thing to work on is creating quality content on your site that people want to read.

neounix · December 16, 2020, 2:27am

I think @Ranjan is asking how Discourse implements search in the Discourse application and is not asking about Google search.

He seems interested to understand how Discourse implements their internal search algorithm, and a good place to start is here in class SearchController:

github.com

discourse/discourse/blob/94cd5ac0b1b654ba55028c3cdead1bfb40af2991/app/controllers/search_controller.rb

# frozen_string_literal: true

class SearchController < ApplicationController

  before_action :cancel_overloaded_search, only: [:query]
  skip_before_action :check_xhr, only: :show
  after_action :add_noindex_header

  def self.valid_context_types
    %w{user topic category private_messages tag}
  end

  def show
    permitted_params = params.permit(:q, :page)
    @search_term = permitted_params[:q]

    # a q param has been given but it's not in the correct format
    # eg: ?q[foo]=bar
    if params[:q].present? && !@search_term.present?
      raise Discourse::InvalidParameters.new(:q)

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Hey @Ranjan … you would be amazed at how much information can be found in the Discourse open source code on GitHub!