# Optimizing Discourse search for CJK languages

**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/optimizing-discourse-search-for-cjk-languages/28741
**Category:** Site Management
**Tags:** how-to, localization
**Created:** [13.Май.2015 02:57:38 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/optimizing-discourse-search-for-cjk-languages/28741 "2015-05-13T02:57:38Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

### Author: ![Discourse](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/discourse/32/148734_2.png) [@Discourse](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Discourse)
#### Post date: [13.Май.2015 02:57:38 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/optimizing-discourse-search-for-cjk-languages/28741/1 "2015-05-13T02:57:38Z")

</div>

> 🔖 This guide explains how to adjust Discourse settings to better accommodate Chinese, Japanese, and Korean (CJK) languages in site search.
> 
> 🙋 Required user level: Administrator

Discourse’s default settings may not be optimal for CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) languages. However, **Discourse now automatically adjusts many of these settings when your site’s locale is set to a CJK language** (Japanese, Simplified Chinese, or Traditional Chinese). This guide explains what is configured automatically and what you may still need to adjust manually.

## Automatic locale defaults

When your site’s default locale is set to `ja`, `zh_CN`, or `zh_TW`, the following settings are automatically adjusted:

| Setting | Default | CJK locale default |
| --- | --- | --- |
| `min_search_term_length` | 3 | 1 (also applies to `ko`) |
| `min_post_length` | 20 | 8 |
| `min_first_post_length` | 20 | 8 |
| `min_personal_message_post_length` | 10 | 3 |
| `body_min_entropy` | 7 | 3 |
| `min_topic_title_length` | 15 | 6 |
| `title_min_entropy` | 10 | 3 |
| `min_title_similar_length` | 10 | 4 |
| `allow_uppercase_posts` | false | true (`ja` only) |
| `title_prettify` | true | false |

If your site uses one of these locales, you generally don’t need to change these settings — they’ll already be optimized for CJK.

## Manual adjustments

### Korean locale

Korean (`ko`) only receives an automatic locale default for `min_search_term_length`. If your site uses the Korean locale, you should manually adjust the other settings listed above to similar values.

### Multilingual or non-CJK locale sites with CJK content

If your site’s default locale is not a CJK language but you have significant CJK-speaking users, you’ll need to adjust these settings manually:

- Set `min_search_term_length` to **1** or **2** — CJK keywords can be as short as one or two characters
- Set `min_post_length` to approximately **8**
- Set `body_min_entropy` to about **3** — reduplication is common and meaningful in CJK languages, so setting this too high may cause “not meaningful post” errors
- Set `min_topic_title_length` to approximately **6**
- Set `title_min_entropy` to about **3**
- Set `min_title_similar_length` to approximately **4**
- Enable `allow_uppercase_posts` — Discourse may not recognize CJK characters when analyzing topic titles for case, causing errors
- Disable `title_prettify` — title prettification rules are designed for Latin scripts and may not work well with CJK text

### Search tokenization

For improved search accuracy, Discourse offers optional CJK-specific tokenization settings:

- `search_tokenize_chinese` — enables segmentation of Chinese text for better search results
- `search_tokenize_japanese` — enables segmentation of Japanese text for better search results

These are disabled by default and can be enabled in the admin search settings.

## Troubleshooting search issues

If you encounter problems with search functionality after making these changes, you may need to reindex your database. Here’s how to do it:

1. Enter your Discourse Docker installation directory.
2. Run the following command to access the app container:

```plaintext
./launcher enter app

```

3. Once inside the container, run the reindexing command:

```plaintext
rake search:reindex

```

After reindexing, you should be able to search content effectively.

> Last edited by @hugh 2024-07-26T01:02:02Z
> 
> Last checked by @sam 2026-03-18T04:23:22Z
> 
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