docsearch/docs-src/configuration-help.md

title
Customize my DocSearch

What content do we recommend to index?

Code blocks

We do not recommend indexing code tags since code blocks are most likely very similar and redundant from one page to another. You can exclude code blocks by adding their matching selectors to selectors_exclude.

A good practice would be to emphasize the meaningful underlying part of it thanks to a dedicated class, which you will want to add to the text selector in your configuration file.

For example, in this code snippet, you can exclude the code but the parameters of the function:

<code>
function(<toIndex>something useful to search for</toIndex>)
...
</code>

Table of contents

The elements of the table of contents only target but do not provide content. They are merely a step on the way to reaching relevant content. As a result, they are almost always in a different place from the payload. This is why we consider the table of contents an obstacle for DocSearch to find the coveted information.

We therefore do not recommend indexing the elements of the table of contents; their matching selectors should be added to selectors_exclude.

How are my DocSearch records ranked?

DocSearch empowers the Algolia ranking strategy. The formula is completely based on the tie-breaking approach.

The special feature of DocSearch's ranking resides in the custom ranking:

We have defined 3 main weight indicators for every record. These values are ordered by importance following the tie-breaking approach:

1. page_rank: this value, equal to 0 by default, can be set from the start_urls object. It can be customized in order to boost or restrain some records depending on their webpage's URL. It will need to match a specific regular expression pattern.

Example:

{
  "index_name": "example",
   "start_urls": [
    {
     "url": "http://example.com/docs/api/v1\\.[0-9]",
     "page_rank": 1
    }
   ]
}

2. level: this value depends on the level of the record. A record's level is its deepest level attribute not null. text records have a weight of 0.
3. position: This value is the position of the matching element within every picked up element along the original HTML flow. The sooner the record appears, the higher it will be ranked.

You can override the way these elements are impacting the search thanks to custom_settings.

Example:

"custom_settings": {
 "customRanking": [
 "asc(weight.position)",
   "desc(weight.page_rank)",
   "desc(weight.level)"
 ]
}