How does result excerpt highlighting work and how to turn it off if needed? (Doc ID 1040892.1)

Last updated on JULY 16, 2018

Applies to:

Symptoms

The title is always part of the search result posted...and the title is never highlighted, just the excerpt. There are times when a search matches best on a title and sometimes it matches best on a sentence in the document. When it matches best on the title the title can become the excerpt.

The highlighted words will be the concepts/synonyms and tokens that are matched in the search.
You may have 5 words in the sentence. But those words may invoke 5 different concepts with a total of 20 different synonyms.
Then the matching is done on more words than those in the original question.
In test drive you have to look at the unstructured results tab to see which search components gave points for which SC rules.
There are no words of a question that are matched or considered higher than others except how the rules are defined to give points based on specific conditions.
Too many SC rules or too many custom high scoring rules can cause unexpected results in the system. A boost should be a low amount of points because you want the scoring to really match the words in the question so the user can be more and more precise to article content. For example if you score title matching too high, then article content can become much less significant and content is more important than titles. Titles should be a nominal boost. OOB titles is a 10 point boost.

In large systems these balances are only controlled by user filtering. And pre-filtering is encouraged in large content systems.

Changes

How to disable/turn off the result excerpt highlighting from the installed ui.jsp search or custom search request.xml/response.xml UI?

Cause