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Experience Builder Search Functionality

marksm_macomb

I keep struggling with the Experience Builder search widget behaving wonky. I was able to set it up to search my feature layers and zoom to features, but I still don't understand how the text searching actually works. I do not have "exact match" enabled so the search should work as a "contains", correct? Here are some examples of that not working.

Say I want to search my developments for "The Corners at Cherry Glen" (an existing development).

If I start searching "Corners", my result is in the suggested list as intended:

If I start searching "The", I don't get my intended result returned, or anything beginning with "The":

If I start searching "The Corners" - this is BEFORE I hit enter, nothing comes up:

AFTER I hit enter on "The Corners" even though it brought up no results prior to hitting enter, suddenly it shows up as suggested:

This makes it very confusing for the end user. I'm not sure if this is intended behavior, if it's a bug, or if there's some little setting I'm missing. I do have "Auto select the first result" enabled in the search result settings.

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TimWestern

I have seen similar slowness in EXB with the Search Widget (not to be confused with the map search, which at times seems to feel like its acting differently)

I recently had one that I reviewed all the fields it was querying, and realized that sometimes the 'auto' search while type may be making the searches take longer, specially if you have layers being queried that are less likely to be normal selections. For me I updated which ones were searched vs what was displayed, and it began to act much much faster. It may depend on how much you are querying though.

tasubasu

Hi Shengdi,
Thanks for your reply. We are using ArcGIS Enterprise 11.1.

Good question, I think the option to disable search suggestions would be useful, but with the introduction of begins with in later versions I think we wouldn't need it ourselves. Thank you.

Shengdi Zhang

Hi @tasubasu ,

Which version of Experience Builder are you using? For ArcGIS Online, using "begin with" to query suggestions was introduced in November 2023. For ArcGIS Enterprise, it's available from version 11.3 onward.

and it starts a new query for each character you add

Currently, it is by design that new requests are sent to query suggestions whenever the search input changes. We're considering modifying this behavior by not sending requests if the user has disabled search suggestions. We'd like to know if this potential change would address your concerns.

Regards,

Shengdi

tasubasu

I have come across a similar issue. It appears the search widget searches well if you copy and paste a whole address, but... if you type in an address it slows right down. In developer tools it looks like it does a new search for each string you enter using "%LIKE%" to look for that text, and it starts a new query for each character you add. So it's not using begins/starts with. So it's slow to load results unless you copy and paste a full string. Can this be improved through configuration? Or is it strictly the Search widget in-built settings?

lmott

https://doc.arcgis.com/en/experience-builder/11.1/configure-widgets/search-widget.htm

New search source - layer source - select layer & configure

JenniferEyre

You were able to set up your Experience Builder search function to search your feature layers - can you tell me how you achieved it? I'm struggling with that at the moment.

marksm_macomb

@ShengdiZhang Is there any chance that this gets re-looked at by those teams? It seems really un-intuitive for the everyday non-GIS user. Is this something that should be submitted as an idea?

Shengdi Zhang

I double-checked with the corresponding teams, and their response was similar to your guess.

When building a full-text index for search suggestions, there are a number of stop words that are not indexed because they are not considered important in a search. Stop words include something like “in”, “the”, etc.

lmott

I found similar behavior. I have users that get irritated typing '10 1st st nw' and it comes up in the middle of the list rather the top. What comes up first and stays at the top is something like '1058 1st st nw'. I don't have exact checked either because you want options but when something 100% matches what you typed you'd think it would show as the first result.

marksm_macomb

This makes sense, because the same behavior happened when I tried searching "at Cherry" - nothing was returned at all likely due to the "at". So there must be certain "filler" words that cause the search to not return anything, which is pretty silly to me.

marksm_macomb

Yes, I do have both search and display fields matching.

TimWestern

The is an interesting search term. It gets used so much in english, that it often gets treated as a noise word (ie not descriptive of anything) in other search algorithms. Could it be search widget is doing that?

I admit though, the fact it found Theater but not The makes me wonder if its looking for The+whatever comes next, and not The as an exact match too.

RachealFarinloye

The search functionality behaves wonkyy! I think I have come across this before, Did you make sure that your searching fields and display fields match? They both need to match

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