All Planet 4 sites are powered by Elastic Search, an open-source engine providing scalable, near real-time and multi-tenancy crawls. Elastic Search allows P4 to incorporate 3rd parties crawls, and will be super useful in the future, for instance to include Archived P3 sites in the search results.
The search results page
Anytime one or more terms are inserted in the search box, Elastic Search will pull out a page with the following url structure:
- https://www.greenpeace.org/domain/?s=KEY1+KEY2+KEY3&orderby=_score
Here’s an example > https://www.greenpeace.org/new-zealand/?s=Polar+bear&orderby=_score
By default, Take Action pages are pulled out first, as the most relevant content. Posts are also pulled out right after, showing their Post type, #Tags and Excerpt.
Should the post be without Excerpt, the first 25 words are shown, cut with 3 points…
Filters
On the left side of the search results page, users can refine search according to:
>> one or more Issues (Aka Categories)
>> one or more Campaigns (Aka #Tags)
>> one or more Categories (Aka Post types)
>> one or several content type (pages, documents, etc)
Selecting a filter, a query will be added to the url, for example, if to our previous search results page we add the “#Forest” Tag, the result will be:
- https://www.greenpeace.org/domain/?s=KEY1+KEY2+KEY3&orderby=_score&f%5Btag%5D%5BForests%5D=20
Search weight in Posts / Pages
As mentioned,, Take Action pages are pulled out first, with default weight 2000, then Pages with default weight 100 and then the rest of the Posts. Editors can, however, manually determine the search weight of the page / post (See create Posts & Pages).
The Search function will present first posts or pages with the higher search weight.
- 1 >> Minimum weight
- 100 >> Default (normal) Page weight
- 2000 >> Default Action Page weight
- 3000 >> Maximum weight
Integration with Archived content
It is possible to include Archived content from the Greenpeace collection in the Internet Archive among the P4 search results, allowing users to decide whether to view historical pages from P3 (or previous versions of Greenpeace websites) or not.
KEY INFO – This is a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) of a basic integration of Greenpeace archives into P4. Help the team improve it by adding all requirements!
Archive intergration design specifications
Setup of the archive integration
P4 Administrators can determine whether to include Archived content or not in P4 search results. In Settings > Planet 4, the command will allow to turn on / off the Archive integration.
KEY INFO – By default, the Archive content integration is OFF. By enabling this option, content from the archived P3 site will be included in P4 search results (if users selects to include them).
How archived content is presented
If the setting above is checked, users performing a search will be presented the option to include archived content among the P4 search results or not. Here’s how this will happen:
- After 3 times the “Load More” Button is clicked / loaded
- a Radio button will appear
- If selected, 2 out of the next 5 results will be archived results
- If un-selected, all 5 next results will be P4 content.
KEY INFO – Archived content will have a different design from regular P4 results, will show only title and description and always open in a new tab ↗️
How the integration works
Search keys, subdirectories and language variations will be maintained when browsing the WayBack Machine archive subdirectory. This means that:
- if a user searches “Arctic, Oil” in greenpeace.org/AFRICA/en
- the integration will pull out content from:
- https://wayback.archive-it.org/9650/20191111195207/http://p3-raw.greenpeace.org/africa/en/
- containing “ARCTIC” + “OIL”
[Specs on Search API to be included]
Elastic Search configuration and Sync
As Admin, go to Settings > ElasticPress.
The ElasticSearch host is `http://p4-es-elasticsearch-client.default.svc.cluster.local:9200/` and should automatically be set for all P4 sites.
If this is not configured in your site, insert the host above then hit “Sync”, leaving all the search settings enabled. This will create an index of the pages/posts/documents that exist in the currently used language.
KEY INFO – For Multilingual NRO sites you will need to run a “Sync” for each one of the available languages. So, you will need to change language in the admin panel and do it again.
Questions or doubts? Contact the P4 team.
ElasticSearch intro video
Check the official Elastic site or watch the video below to learn more about what Elastic Search does..
Advanced config – tech documentation
Are you a Dev / ElasticSearch specialist? Check this page to learn how Planet4 uses it and how you can do advanced customisation.
Links & Resources
- Elastic Search website