WinCC OA Documentation - Search Engine

Search Index and Interface

The online help contains a search index. The index goes through all HTML pages to gather information. The search interface allows you to search for topics through the index. The found topics are shown on a search page.

Search Field and Results

Enter a search term in the search field and the results are displayed on a results page. To open a topic, click on a result. The search results are highlighted.

Each result includes a topic title. Click the title to open the page. Under the title, a breadcrumb is displayed that shows the path of the topic and you can click any of the topics in the breadcrumb to open that particular page.

If you enter several search words and one of the words is found, the other missing words will be listed below each result.

Search Feature Rating and Sorting

For the search, a mechanism calculates scores for each result that matches the search citeria. The search results are sorted according to the following criteria:

  • Search entries that meet the phrase search criteria are shown first.
  • The number of keywords found on a single page (the higher the number, the better).
  • The context (for example, a word found in a title, scores better than a word found in plain text).

The search ranking order, sorted by relevance is as follows:

  • The search term is contained in a meta keyword.
  • The search term is in the title of the page.
  • The search term is contained in bold text in a paragraph.

Search Rules

  • Use quotes to search for multiple phrases consisting of multiple words, for example New feature.
  • For the Boolean Search the operators: and, or, not can be used. If two adjacent search terms are used without an operator, or is used as the default search operator (for example, New feature is the same as New or feature). The space character separates keywords (for example, New feature are two separate keywords).
  • Words that consist of two or more words with colon, minus, underscore or period characters count as a single word.
  • A search term should contain two or more characters. This rule does not apply to CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) languages.
  • If you search for several words in Chinese, Japanese or Korean, languages that contain them appear in strings without a space separator. Add a space to separate the words. Otherwise the words are not found.