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Introduction to search lenses

What is a search lens?

A search lens changes what people can find in search based on where they are on your site and which search interface they are using.

Use lenses when different parts of your site need different search behavior. For example, you can show only blog posts in a blog search field, or only product pages in a store search.

Each lens does two things:

  • decides where it applies
  • decides what content it can return

If you get stuck, contact support and we can help.

Examples

Here are two common setups.

Suppose your blog lives at /blog.

Your header already links to /search, which searches the whole site. Now you want a search input on the blog page that searches only blog content.

To do that, create a new lens from the Search Lenses page. In the lens editor:

  • Set Paths where this lens should be used to /blog* so the lens applies on the blog and its subpages.
  • Leave Search inputs enabled and turn off Search overlay if you have a search input field on your blog page, and additionally have a search link in your top navbar (if you have such a thing) that you do not want to restrict.
  • Disable documents if they should not appear in blog search.
  • In Pages to include or exclude, exclude everything with /*, then bring the blog back with !/blog*.

After you save, the header search still searches the whole site. The blog search field returns blog content only.

Now imagine your site uses language paths in the URL. For example:

  • acme.org and acme.org/en for English
  • acme.org/no for Norwegian
  • acme.org/de for German

You usually want search to return results in the same language the visitor is viewing. Lenses make that possible.

Start with the English version. You can use the Default lens for that and exclude the other language sections:

# Exclude Norwegian pages
/no*

# Exclude German pages
/de*

Then create separate and additional search lenses for the Norwegian and German sections of your site. The search lens for the Germany part of your site would need to bind to:

/de*

to be enabled on the German part of your website, and exclude all but the German pages:

/*
!/de*

And likewise for the Norwegian lens. It should bind to:

/no*

and exclude all but the Norwegian pages:

/*
!/no*

The German example below shows the idea. The Norwegian lens is set up the same way.

After saving, use the lens tester on the Search Lenses overview page to confirm that the right lens is selected for each path.

Help

This is a fairly complex topic. We'll be happy to help you if you get stuck, don't hesitate to reach out!