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KB User's Guide - Documents Tab - Attachment Search

In addition to searching for document keywords and text, the KB's search engine allows users to search for text within certain types of file attachments.

NoteInformation symbol

The "Search mode" dropdown that contains the option for "Attachments search" is only available in KB sites that use the traditional keyword and title-based search engine. If your group has enabled semantic search for your KB site, attachments are indexed differently and cannot be searched for individually.

Please see KB User's Guide - Understanding the New Semantic Search Engine for more information on the differences between the two search engines.

Background

When a user enters a query into the KnowledgeBase search field, the KB's search engine has three layers of information it looks through:

  1. Keywords: the keywords and title attached to a specific document.
  2. Fulltext: all of the text in a given document itself.
  3. Attachments: the text of properly formatted PDF, Word (.doc and .docx), and Text (.txt) files attached to documents in a site.

Directions

To view attachment search results for a given query:

  1. Perform an initial search using the search box at the top of the page. For most sites, the default search mode will be a title + keywords search, though this varies.

  2. You will find a search mode dropdown above the list of search results. This will allow you to switch from the current search mode to one that includes attachments. Specifically, you can choose between:

    • Attachments
    • Title + keywords + attachments
    • Fulltext + attachments

    The search mode dropdown is found after the result count and above the list of results

  3. Attachment results will appear in the results with their file name in place of where a document title would be. An icon will be displayed next to the name to indicate that it is a file that can be downloaded.

    The link for an attachment will use the file name as the link display text, and the ID number of the document the attachment is from will also be included in the results.

See Also