Tag: search

  • Search Experience

    The Grow Search Experience goes beyond a traditional search box and allows your readers to personalize their journey through your content.

    When enabled, Grow’s Search can be initiated through the Grow widget or integrated with your site’s native search elements.

    Click here to launch the Grow Search Experience!

    Search Homepage

    Initiating Search pulls up the Search homepage, where readers can enter search terms and see content personalized to their browsing.

    The Search homepage layout includes:

    Search

    Search allows readers to enter phrases, keywords, and more search terms to discover posts on your site. Unlike other search tools, Grow’s Search is probabilistic, meaning the search results will contain both posts meeting the search terms and posts the reader is most likely to click next based on their browsing history. This search is designed to get the second (and beyond) click!

    Most Popular

    Your Most Popular section displays the top five posts as chosen by your readers’ Grow bookmarks and shares. If you have share counts enabled in your Grow Appearance settings, those counts will be displayed on all the post featured in search.

    Featured Category

    Featured Category allows you to choose one of the post categories on your site and will display the posts in that category. In order for Featured Category to appear, you will need to install and activate the Grow for WordPress plugin.

    This is an optional section and can be enabled in your Grow Search settings.

    Your Bookmarks

    Your Bookmarks displays the posts on your site a reader has saved with Grow.

    If a reader is signed into a Grow account, their bookmarks for all time from your site will be displayed here as long as they are signed into Grow.

    If the reader is signed into Grow or does not have a Grow account, the posts they save on your site will be displayed here until they clear their browser cache.

    Viewed Recently

    This section will display the posts the reader has previously viewed on your site.

    If they are logged into a Grow account, this will show them their viewed posts for all time.

    If readers are not logged into a Grow account, this will show them all posts viewed until the browser cache is cleared.

    Latest

    This section displays your recently published posts from newest to oldest.

    Click here to launch the Grow Search Experience!

    Search Results Page

    Readers will see the Search results page after they’ve entered their search terms.

    The Search results page features the following sections:

    Top Results

    These are post matching the search term. Post titles, content, and metadata can be used to determine if a post should be returned in search results. Results are displayed probabilistically, serving posts the reader is most likely to click next first.

    Latest

    This section displays your recently published posts matching the search term from newest to oldest.

    Categories

    Posts in categories relating to the search term will be served, allowing readers to browse through specific categories for a post to match their query.

    For example, searching “chocolate” may bring up the Desserts, Cakes, Cookies, and Beverages categories on the search results page.

    Click here to launch the Grow Search Experience!

    How to Set Up Search

    To enable Search, navigate to Grow Publisher Portal and click Grow Settings > Search. Then, click the toggle by Search to enable Grow’s search on your site. Click Save Changes in the bottom right corner and Search can be initiated via the Grow widget.

    If you’d like to launch Grow’s Search with your site’s native search elements, enable the toggle by Site Search Integration. You may need to define custom search selectors to specifically target your site’s search elements. Don’t forget to click Save Changes!

    Ready to set up Search?

    Head to Grow Publisher Portal to get started!

    These articles may be helpful:

  • Excluding Posts

    Many Grow features serve bookmarks to posts and pages on your site to readers, but there are cases where a publisher might not want to direct all traffic to a specific post or page. These might be archive pages that don’t have ads and won’t monetize well, members-only pages, seasonal posts that are not currently in season, or affiliate posts.

    To ensure the best user experience possible, Grow allows publishers to exclude specific posts from Grow’s features!

    When you choose to exclude a post, you will be preventing it from appearing in all Grow features. That means excluding a post removes it from Recommended Content widgets, Automailer emails, and Grow’s Search experience. Readers can still access these posts, but Grow will not drive traffic to them with its recommendation engine.

    How to Exclude Single Posts in Grow

    To exclude single posts in Grow, you’ll navigate to Grow Publisher Portal and click Grow Settings > Recommended Content in the siderail. From there, you’ll scroll down to the Pages to Exclude section.

    In the Pages to Exclude section, you’re able to search for specific posts with keywords, titles, and more. Once you’ve located the post you wish to exclude, click Exclude. You can do this as many times as you need to exclude the posts you do not wish to appear in Grow’s features.

    When you’re done excluding posts, scroll down and click Save Changes in the bottom right to remove the posts from Grow.

    Read more about excluding single posts in Grow.

    If you would like to restore posts to Grow’s features, all you need to do is head back to the Pages to Exclude section to find your list of excluded posts. From there, you’ll find the post you’d like to include in Grow features and click the include button. Don’t forget to click Save Changes in the bottom right corner to add the posts back to Grow.

    How to Exclude Multiple Posts in Grow

    Grow also supports excluding multiple posts at a time by applying custom URL filters. Whether or not this works for your site depends on your site’s URL structure. If your permalinks don’t include a common slug, it is likely better to exclude individual posts and pages.

    For example, if my permalinks for posts in the Recommended Content category all began with demo.grow.me/recommended-content/, I could add a custom URL filter for /recommended-content/ to remove any Recommended Content posts from Grow.

    Read more about excluding multiple posts in Grow.

    Ready to exclude posts from Grow features?

    Head to Grow Publisher Portal to get started!

    These related articles may be helpful: