Note: This article only applies to communities with access to the web or mobile app experience and, therefore, does not apply to Email-Only communities.

Search makes it easy to find what you're looking for in the mobile app and web experience. You can also search topics and user profiles! To learn how you can integrate your content management systems with Firstup, check out our Integrated Search feature.

Firstup’s search foundation includes:

• Enhanced Precision - Refined data indexing to enhance the precision of search results.
• Refined Search Strategies Modern search tactics handle imperfect search queries gracefully, ensuring you find what you need.
• Streamlined Content Discovery with Keywords Content creators are enabled to use meta tags, making content discovery more relevant and efficient.

Our search also allows you to tailor search results to their specific needs and preferences with advanced sorting and filtering options. And anticipate searches by using trends and history, and proactively display relevant results to you.

Note: We’ve identified an issue where searching for a user by their abbreviated first name along with their last name (e.g., 'Chris Williams' instead of 'Christopher Williams') may return results for other users whose names start with those letters (e.g., 'Christian Thompson') or sometimes no results are returned. This issue is slated to be resolved as part of a larger update scheduled for the November 2024 release.

Search Strategies

To maximize the relevancy of results, we employ the following strategies when searching our platform:

• Sophisticated scoring system scores We use a scoring system to decide how relevant content is to your search. The main parts of this system are:
  A. Term Frequency (TF): This checks how often your search term appears in content. The more it appears, the more relevant the content is.
  B. Inverse Document Frequency (IDF): This looks at how common your search term is across all content. If a term appears in a lot of content, it's less important. If it's rare, it's more important.
  C. Field Length: If your search term appears in a shorter field (fewer words), it's more relevant than if it appears in a longer field (many words).
  
  E.g., A term "elephant" appearing a few times in a post D, but not necessarily in all other post, will contribute to give post D a higher score than for all other posts.
  
  A term "and" appearing in almost every post will not contribute much to the score because the IDF will be negligible.
• Mismatched SpellingsFuzzy matches allow flexibility with typos.
  E.g., ‘test’ matches to ‘tyst,’ ‘terst,’ ‘tast’
• Refined Data IndexingFor each result type we consider a set of associated attributes. Refer to Relevant Attributes.

Result Types

You will initially be taken to an overview page to understand all the results returned. You can then drill into different result types to take advantage of filters where available. The six types of results are:

• Posts (sort by 'Relevancy' and filter by 'Topics' and 'Authors')
  
  
  
  
• People (filter by 'Department', 'Job Title', and 'Business Unit')
  
  
  
  
• Topics
• Documents (filter by 'File Type' and 'Publish Date') - Returns only documents attached to posts, not documents within integrations
  
  
  
  
• Shortcuts
• Integrated Searches

Filters

Discover Content with Keywords

When content creators are creating content in Creator Studio, they can add search keywords to help boost the relevancy of their content in the member experience.

Improve Search Results

When you enter an individual results page (example: post), you may see filters that can help improve your search results.

The post page will contain results for any relevant posts the user can see. You can sort by:

You can also filter by the following:

Search Trends and History

Our member experience search anticipates searches with trends and history. When you enter our global search, you will be presented with two types of autofills:

• Terms you’ve searched before (up to 4 term, limited to last 60 days)
• Popular terms among the community (up to 4 term, limited to last 60 days)

Relevant Attributes

How to Search on the Web Experience

1. Log in to the app on the desktop. The search bar is located at the top of the page.
2. Clicking into the search bar will immediately return 'Previous Searches' and 'Trending Searches'. ‘Previous searches’ will be specific to the logged-in user and ‘Trending Searches’ will include searches trending across your community. Select from one of these options or perform a new search.
   
   
   
   
3. Results will appear on the search Overview page, where you will be able to view results returned for Posts, Topics, People, Documents, and Shortcuts. 
   
   Note: People search will only return names. It will not return departments, locations, etc.
   
   
   
   
4. You will also be able to navigate between these options at the top of the page, as well as filter further with available filters. Performing a new search from within one of these navigation options will return results for that option instead of returning to the Overview page.
   
   

How to Search on the Mobile App

1. Log in to your mobile app.
2. Tap on the magnifying glass at the bottom of the screen to start a search.
3. Tapping into the search bar will immediately return 'Previous Searches' (history icon) and 'Trending Searches'. ‘Previous searches’ will be specific to the logged-in user and ‘Trending Searches’ will include searches trending across your community. Select from one of these options or perform a new search.
   
   
   
   
4. Results will appear on the search Overview page, where you will be able to view results returned for Posts, Topics, People, Documents, and Shortcuts.
   
   
   
   
5. You will also be able to navigate between these options at the top of the screen by scrolling sideways, as well as filter further with available filters. Performing a new search from within one of these navigation options will return results for that option instead of returning to the Overview page.