Search & discovery
Tune how visitors find content on your site — search ranking, boosted results, and synonym groups
When you'd use this app
Most editors don't realise they have a Search & discovery app — it's installed on every Basker site by default and works out of the box. You'd come to this page when:
- You've noticed visitors searching for terms that aren't returning 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 isn't 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 don't 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 don't quite match your audience's behaviour.
How search works by default
Search & discovery indexes the content types most visitors look for: pages, events, posts, and people. Each record gets:
- A title and description weighted for matching.
- A digest of body content for full-text search.
- A collection 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 emphasise upcoming dates so that what's about to happen surfaces first. Posts emphasise freshness so recent editorial appears above older content. Pages and people use a balanced ranking that favours title matches and content relevance.
Most of the time the defaults are right and you don't 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 record higher in the results when a visitor searches for one of your terms. Use it when:
- You're running a campaign or season and want a specific event to surface even on broad terms.
- A page exists that's 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 records — 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 records 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 don't 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 any word in a group is searched, the search behaves as if the visitor had searched for any of the others.
Setting up boosts and synonyms
Boosts and synonyms are managed from the Search & discovery area of the Apps section. Each is a small, focused record:
- For a boost: pick the record(s) to boost and the search term(s) that trigger it.
- For a synonym group: enter the words that should be treated as equivalent.
Changes apply to search results within minutes of saving — there's no need to wait for an indexing cycle to complete.
When search results still aren't right
If you've set up boosts and synonyms and the results still aren't matching what visitors expect, the next thing to look at is your content itself. The clearest signals to search are the titles, descriptions, and SEO metadata of your records — 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 — there are platform-level adjustments that can be made for specific cases.