Customizing Search Results
The graphical display editing capabilities of the Watson™ Explorer Engine administration tool make it easy for you to configure how search results are displayed. The configuration items related to how search results are displayed are provided in the Results section of the left-hand display editing menu. The result configuration menus that this section contains are the following:
- List - graphical configuration settings that are related to the entire list of search results, such as information about the total number of results and the number of results in clusters, the links to move from page to page of results, default export formats (if the Exporting Search Results module is enabled), the general text that prompts you for a query, error strings for bad queries or queries that return no results, and so on.
- Actions - graphical configuration settings that are related to the actions that can be performed on an individual result. Options include action title, action position, and select all text.
- Document - graphical configuration settings that apply to the documents shown in
search results, including the document content elements to show in search results, font
settings for results, document title settings (including those for documents that do not
have a title), links associated with each result, such as Cache and "Save to Folder" links,
and so on.
The Document pane also enables you to define types of Custom Documents, which you can then identify and display specially. Search results will be mapped to a custom document type based on the document's @result-type attribute. If your document does not have a @result-type attribute, you can identify it by the @display-source attribute. If your document does not have a @result-type attribute or a @display-source attribute, you can identify it by the @source attribute.
This pane also enables you to define List Boost groups, which are sets of high-priority results that will display before standard search results. Documents that should be boosted are associated with a given List Boost by matching a documents boost-name attribute to a Boost Name that has been defined.
- Fields - graphical configuration settings associated with pre-existing or newly-defined fields. Fields are identified by Field IDs, which map to specific regions in Custom Documents that were defined on the Results > Document display editing menu. Field IDs can differ from content names, so that different content elements from different sources can be displayed differently. Watson Explorer Engine displays typically include predefined fields for portions of a search result such as the cache, size, snippet, source, and url
- Spotlights - the functionality of tabbed spotlights in this display. This is used in conjunction with IO Pro or regular Spotlights to provide a graphical representation of spotlighted results.
Being able to customize how search results are displayed, the types of content elements that they can contain, how each content element is displayed, and having the ability to distinguish between search results from different sources provides a rich, flexible search result display environment. Being able to define custom documents and use fields in search results that match a given document type makes it easy to add type-specific information to matching results, such as including "To:" and "From:" information for email search results, displaying custom links based on content type, and so on. The ability to create Custom Document and Document Field definitions provides an easily-extended display environment with unlimited opportunities for customization.
To proceed with this tutorial, click Adding Display Components.