Searching and Browsing

Two ways to find an article

Browsing — pick a category from the tree and read what is in it, in the order you curated. Good when the reader knows roughly where to look.

Searching — type words into the search box. Good when they know what they want but not where it lives.

Both are available on all three surfaces: your team's Library, the Manage authoring list, and the customer Help center.

Browsing by category

Selecting a category shows the articles in it and everything in its subcategories. Selecting a top-level product category gives you the whole product's content, not just the handful of articles filed directly at the top.

All articles clears the category filter. Uncategorized shows articles with no category at all.

Browse order is the one you curated by dragging rows on the Manage surface — for your team and your customers alike. See Organizing with categories.

Searching

The search box carries the placeholder Search articles and is clearable. It searches as you type, with a short pause so it fires when you stop rather than on every keystroke.

Search covers titles and body text.

How results are ranked

Results are ordered by how well they match, strongest first:

1. The title is exactly your search — ranked highest.
2. The title starts with your search.
3. The title contains your search.
4. Everything else — body-text relevance, with title matches weighted more heavily than body matches.

Ties are broken alphabetically by title.

The practical effect: searching password puts an article titled "Password" first, then "Password reset", then "Reset a forgotten password", then articles that merely mention passwords in the body. Partial words match from the start, so pass finds password.

There is no minimum length. Even a search made up only of very common English words — me, the, we — matches from the start of a word, so me finds meetings.

A common word typed alongside other words is ignored rather than demanded: searching reset your password looks for reset and password, and still finds an article that never uses the word your.

Ranking works identically on all three surfaces, so what your customers experience matches what you see when you test a search.

Filters on the Manage surface

The authoring list adds a state filter your readers never see: All, Draft, Published, Archived.

There is one subtlety worth knowing:

• Browsing with All selected shows drafts and published articles — the active list. Archived articles are not included.
• Searching with All selected likewise shows drafts and published articles and excludes archived.

Neither browsing nor searching should resurface content you retired. When you genuinely want to find an archived article, select the Archived chip explicitly.

If a category (or the whole Knowledge Base) has archived articles but nothing active, the list says No active articles to show and points you at the Archived filter, rather than inviting you to write a first article that already exists.

Drafts are filtered per reader: you always see your own, and holders of Publish knowledge-base articles or Manage all knowledge-base articles see everyone's.

The Manage table columns

What each surface includes

Your team's Library ignores the customer-facing gates entirely — members see everything published. That is the point: your support team should be able to find an internal runbook and a customer-facing guide in the same search.

Result limits

Lists are capped rather than paginated:

• Manage list — 200 articles
• Team Library — 50 articles
• Customer Help center — 50 articles

In practice you reach these by browsing All articles in a large knowledge base. Narrow by category or search rather than scrolling.

When nothing comes back

Each surface distinguishes four situations, so the message tells you what to do:

The last one is not an empty result. If you see it, the list is unknown rather than empty, and the article count is withheld rather than shown as zero.