Search & discovery
Tune how visitors find content on your site: search ranking, boosted results, and synonym groups
When to use this app
Use the Search & discovery app when:
- You notice visitors searching for terms that do not return the obvious result.
- You want a specific event, page, or production to surface higher than the default ranking gives it.
- Your audience uses different words for the same concept and search is not connecting them.
- A campaign or season is running and you want to bias search toward it temporarily.
If none of those apply, the defaults are probably fine and you do not need to configure anything.
How the app works
The Search & discovery app powers the search experience visitors have on your live site. It indexes your pages, events, posts, and people, and refreshes the index as you publish. The app also exposes two tools for tuning the results (search boosts and search synonyms) for the cases where the defaults do not quite match your audience's behavior.
How search works by default
Search & discovery indexes the content types most visitors look for: pages, events, posts, and people. Each item gets:
- A title and description weighted for matching.
- The body text, indexed for full-text search.
- Its content type, so results can be filtered.
- An image for richer result rendering, where your theme uses it.
Default ranking is tuned per content type. Events emphasize upcoming dates so that what is about to happen surfaces first. Posts emphasize freshness so recent editorial appears above older content. Pages and people use a balanced ranking that favors title matches and content relevance.
Most of the time the defaults are right and you do not need to touch anything. Search boosts and synonyms exist for the cases where you want to nudge the ranking deliberately.
Search boosts
A search boost is a rule that pushes a specific item higher in the results when a visitor searches for one of your terms. Use it when:
- You are running a campaign or season and want a specific event to surface even on broad terms.
- A page exists that is the canonical answer to a common question, and you want it to win against more recent but less relevant content.
- A specific person or production should appear first when their name is searched in any spelling.
A search boost has:
- A title identifying it inside Basker.
- One or more boosted items: pages, events, people, or posts you want to push up.
- One or more search terms that trigger the boost. Each term is up to 100 characters.
When a visitor's search matches any of your terms, the boosted items appear higher than they otherwise would. The boost layers on top of the default ranking rather than overriding it. Search boosts increase visibility for specific cases. They do not disable the rest of the ranking.
Search synonyms
A search synonym group is a set of words or phrases that should be treated as equivalent for search. Use it when:
- Your audience uses different terms for the same thing: "concert" and "performance", "season" and "year", "talk" and "lecture".
- Your content uses formal terminology and visitors search casually, or vice versa.
- A composer, performer, or work has multiple common spellings or alternate names you want all to match.
A synonym group has:
- A title identifying it inside Basker.
- A list of words (at least two) that should be matched as equivalent.
When a visitor searches any word in a group, the search behaves as if they had searched for any of the others.
Configuring boosts and synonyms
Open Apps, then Search & Discovery. Its Search Boosts and Search Synonyms tabs link to the lists where you create and edit individual items:
- For a boost: choose the item or items to boost, and the search term or terms that trigger it.
- For a synonym group: enter the words that should be treated as equivalent.
Saving a boost updates the affected search items directly. Basker reads synonyms when a visitor searches, so neither tool needs a separate re-indexing action from you.
When search results are still not right
If you have configured boosts and synonyms and the results still do not match what visitors expect, look at your content itself next. The clearest signals to search are the titles, descriptions, and SEO metadata of your items. See SEO. Vague or inconsistent titles weaken search regardless of how much tuning you do on top.
For deeper search-tuning needs, contact Basker support. They can make platform-level adjustments for specific cases.