Unexposing Hub Pages from Searches

KansasDASC

We have Hub Basic with about 25 different Hub Pages that make up our Hub app. All of it is publicly accessible, but when you search for items, all 25 Hub Pages are returned in the search results along with all the actual data we share. It's not useful to anyone to see those items returned, but they do need to be able to navigate to those pages. I've tried unsharing the Pages and though they no longer show in the search results, the pages in Hub now requires authentication, so that's not a viable solution.

Is there a way to restrict certain content types (Hub Sites, Apps, Initiatives) from showing in the Hub search results?

AndrewTurner

Thanks for sharing your feedback. We've heard similar requests over the years. 

I'll share our thinking about why pages are included in search and then I'm curious to hear your perspective based on this. 

Web search, from Google to government websites, to even Esri community include web pages that contain relevant information. The visitor doesn't yet know if their search is best answered with a dataset, app, document, or hub page. Search is meant to integrate across all content and provide the most relevant sources for information on the topic. By not including Pages - it's possible that visitors searching won't find the useful information that's embedded deeply on a page. 

With that said - what are the pages you are sharing where you don't want people to find them through search? Are there perhaps different modes of 'browse' vs. 'search within' that your users are expecting?  Have you talked with any external users to hear their perspective on search including Pages? 

These are open questions - we're always trying to provide a great experience for a wide range of users, most of which are not yet familiar with the structure and types of content available through a Hub site.