Introduction to search lenses

What is a search lens?

A search lens controls search results for a specific part of your site or a specific search interface.

Use lenses when parts of the site need different search behaviour. For example, a blog search input can return only blog posts, and a shop search can return only products.

Each lens controls:

• where the lens applies
• which content the lens can return

If you need help, contact support.

Examples

These examples show two common setups.

Blog-only search

In this example, the blog is under /blog.

The header link to /search searches the full site. A search input on the blog searches only blog content.

Create a lens on the Search Lenses page.

Set these options:

• Set Paths where this lens should be used to /blog* so the lens applies on the blog and its subpages.
• Leave Search inputs enabled.
• Disable Search overlay if the header search link must continue to search the whole site.
• Disable products and documents if they must not appear in blog search.
• In Pages to include or exclude, exclude everything with /*, then bring the blog back with !/blog*.

After you save, the header search still searches the whole site. The blog search field returns only blog content.

Multilingual search

Use one lens for each language path. For example:

• acme.org and acme.org/en for English
• acme.org/no for Norwegian
• acme.org/de for German

Search results should use the language of the current page.

Use the Default lens for English. Exclude the other language sections:

# Exclude Norwegian pages
/no*

# Exclude German pages
/de*

Create one lens for Norwegian and one for German. The image below shows the German lens. Set up the Norwegian lens in the same way.

Set these options:

1. Set Paths where this lens should be used to /de*. Use /de*, not /de, so the lens applies to the full German section and not only the root page.
2. Enable the search surfaces that should use the German lens. If both Search inputs and Search overlay are enabled, both search experiences stay in German.
3. In Pages to include or exclude, exclude everything with /*, then bring back German content with !/de*.

Save the lenses. Use the lens tester on the Search Lenses page to confirm which lens applies to each path.

In this example, a Norwegian path selects the Norwegian lens.