Search

When creating or editing an answer, what is the Keywords field used for?

Environment:

Knowledge Foundation Answers > Keywords

Resolution:

The Keywords field allows you to enter additional words and phrases that do not appear in the Summary, Question, or Answer fields for that answer, but are still closely related to the content of the answer. This could include synonyms for words in the answer or abbreviations and acronyms.

When additional words and phrases are added to the Keywords field, the answer will be listed when a search is performed using that keyword or phrase. Any keywords and phrases you enter in the Keywords field are given the greatest weight (by default) in determining matches when an end-user searches on the Find Answers page. The keywords are also used when the answers are clustered for use with the browse feature.

The maximum length of a keyword is 25 characters. Any word longer than 25 characters is excluded as a keyword, and is therefore not searchable. In addition, as with other searching options, keyword searching is not sensitive to whether the text is upper or lowercase.

Important Note: When adding keywords and phrases to an answer, multiple entries MUST be separated by commas. Failure to include items in a comma-separated list could result in improper search results and performance issues.

By adding keywords and phrases, you can include synonyms and additional terminology that your end-users may use when searching for items. For example, your company may call a customer's submittal for assistance a "trouble report", and based on that, one of your answers is "How do I submit a trouble report?"

Since new customers may not use that specific term, they may search on a variety of words and phrases. In this case, you could enter the following items in the Keywords field:

incident, assistance request, service request, help

By adding these words and phrases, the desired answer "How do I submit a trouble report?" would appear in the search results even when the end-user did not search specifically for "trouble report" and instead searched on a word or phrase in the Keywords list.

Words listed in the Keywords field are stemmed to the root word or component. As a result, you do not need to enter words that differ only in the suffixes used, i.e. take, takes, taking, taken.

Aliasing: You can define aliases that are used throughout your published answers. That way, you do not need to add groups of keywords to several individual answers.

For more information on created aliases, refer to Answer ID 1995: Using a list of common aliases and keywords for all answers.