Higher Education Website Search Best Practices
Websites for higher education are packed with information but that can make it difficult for potential students to find a
SearchStax is announcing the availability of a new Drupal Module that integrates SearchStax Studio with any Drupal 8 or 9 environment. The module lets users set up and configure site search on Drupal in less than 60 minutes with just a few clicks and configurations.
The Drupal SearchStax integration module was developed jointly with Thomas Seidl (a.k.a. Drunken Monkey in the Drupal Community,) the renowned creator and maintainer of the Drupal Search API. The SearchStax integration module follows all Drupal open source code guidelines and is available in the Drupal project at https://www.drupal.org/project/searchstax. You can also view the Drupal Module Documentation under the Integrations section of the Site Search Product Documentation.
Thomas Seidl had this to say about the Drupal Module in the recent press release:
“The SearchStax integration module installs like any other module and does all the heavy lifting of binding the existing Drupal Search to a new backend with more capabilities. It’s a great way to improve Drupal search rapidly and with little effort.”
Sameer Maggon, Founder and CEO of SearchStax added this to Thomas’ comment:
“Our integration module instantly makes the power of our Site Search product available to nearly all modern Drupal sites. Drupal search pages are unchanged but can deliver more relevant results immediately.”
Once the SearchStax Drupal Module is installed and configured, Site Search automatically indexes any new or updated content in the Drupal environment. Site Search also becomes the backend behind any existing or new standard Drupal search page. The module adds search functionality while requiring virtually no changes to the Drupal site.
Site Search includes a management console where administrators and marketers have the tools to configure the search experience with facets, search fields, stopwords, synonyms and auto-suggest, analyze the key metrics about how users are using search and manage the relevance of the search experience with field boosting, rules and promotions.
Here are some additional details on what the SearchStax Drupal Module includes:
The SearchStax UX Accelerator also known as the SearchJs Search module provides search UX best practices out-of-the-box and integrates easily into any Drupal website. For more information on the features in StudioJS, check out our blog post on UX Best Practices for Site Search.
Search results are automatically tracked for all searches known to the Drupal Search API module and for the StudioJS search app, and no further configuration is needed. You can verify which searches are “known to the Drupal Search API module” by going to the SearchStax configuration page and seeing which searches are listed under Search-specific analytics keys.
In case you use custom code on your site to display a search page and your search is not listed there, you have to provide a Search API “Display” plugin for your search. See the Search API documentation for details. This will also allow other modules, like Facets and Search API Autocomplete, to work with your search, so is good practice in any case.
As there are a lot of different ways how search results and the associated result links are generated in Drupal, the SearchStax module cannot reliably provide support for tracking search result clicks for all of them. A best effort is made to at least provide click tracking out-of-the-box for the most common setups for the two most popular ways of generating search pages, Views and Search API Pages.
In combination with the Search API Autocomplete module, search suggestions are provided to visitors when they enter search keywords and are backed by the Site Search suggestion engine.
To see whether your search is already supported, execute a search with keywords, then open your browser’s development tools pane (Network tab) and click on any search result. In the Network tab you should then see a request to a URL such as:
https://app.searchstax.com/api/v2/track/?data=DATA, where DATA is a base 64-encoded JSON string with the tracking data and it should contain “event”:”_searchclick”.
SearchStax Studio is a game changer that makes it quicker, easier and less expensive for companies to deliver relevant and personalized site search experiences websites. If you want to learn more about the Drupal Module for SearchStax, please contact us for a quick discussion and demonstration.
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