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Search > Search Features > Dynamic Navigation

Use the Search > Search Features > Dynamic Navigation page to perform the following tasks:

• Enabling or disabling dynamic navigation
• Creating a new configuration and adding attributes that are presented as navigation options in the front end
• Changing the Order of Attributes
• Editing a configuration
• Deleting a configuration
• Deleting an attribute

Additionally, the search appliance supports configuring query expansion for dynamic navigation.

Dynamic navigation helps users explore search results by using specific metadata attributes and the entities configured in and discovered by entity recognition.

The attributes and ranges that you define on this page are presented as navigation options in the front end. Users can then select multiple attributes and can easily back out of their selections to navigate the result set and quickly locate the results they are looking for.

Dynamic navigation also displays the counts for all matching results, as well as the number of values not displayed for an attribute, with a More link.

When a user clicks on a value, the search results are filtered to contain results from the original search query that also have that specific attribute value. The options are refreshed with the attribute values that are applicable to the new result set.

Dynamic Navigation also provides search with auto-completion for attributes that have more values to display. This is indicated by a search icon (small magnifying glass) in the attribute name bar. To activate search with auto-completion, the user clicks the attribute name bar. As the user types in the search box, she can select any value in the auto-completion drop-down menu to filter the results.

You can use the following types of attributes in dynamic navigation:

• Attributes based on META tags found in the HTML of the documents in the search index
• Attributes based on metadata from databases, connectors, or feeds
• Attributes based on entities discovered by entity recognition

For example, suppose multiple HTML documents in your corpus include the following metadata value pairs:

<META NAME="dept" CONTENT="Sales">
<META NAME="dept" CONTENT="Engineering">
<META NAME="dept" CONTENT="Marketing">

By using the Search > Search Features > Dynamic Navigation page, you can add the dept attribute so that it appears as a "Department" option on the search results page. All the values associated with the dept attribute appear under the option.

To use dynamic navigation, you create a dynamic navigation configuration. A configuration defines the metadata attributes and entities that are used to generate dynamic navigation options. By using the Search > Search Features > Dynamic Navigation page, you can create different configurations and apply the configurations to different front ends.

Under Existing Configurations, the page shows a list of the dynamic navigation configurations that have been created.

You can create and use a dynamic navigation configuration specifically for a detailed view of expert search results. To configure expert search, use the Search > Search Features > Expert Search page. When you configure dynamic navigation for expert search, the Expert Search column appears in the table of existing configurations. A value of "true" indicates that the configuration is used for expert search.

Google recommends that administrators do not edit such connected dynamic navigation configurations by using the Search > Search Features > Dynamic Navigation page unless they know what they are doing. It is better to edit these configurations by using the Search > Search Features > Expert Search page. For information about dynamic navigation in expert search, click Admin Console Help > Search > Search Features > Expert Search.

Also, for any configuration, you can enable dynamic navigation for secure search. If you enable it, the search appliance only uses documents that are authorized for the user to generate navigation options for front ends in the configuration. For more information, see "Dynamic Navigation for Secure Search."

Before Starting this Task

Because an attribute that you add by using this page must exactly match the metadata NAME, ensure that you have the correct name from the metadata attribute before adding the dynamic navigation attribute. For entities, you do not need to perform this task because you select a name from a pull-down menu with all possible entities, as described in "Adding Attributes Based on Entities Discovered by Entity Recognition."

Enabling or Disabling Dynamic Navigation

Dynamic navigation is disabled by default. To enable dynamic navigation, click Enable. To disable dynamic navigation, click Disable.

About Attributes

Attributes are presented as navigation options in the front end. Add an attribute by supplying the following information:

• Display label
• Attribute name
• Type
• Case-Insensitive Attribute
• Range Attribute
• Sorting Options

Display Label

The display label for the attribute appears on the search results page. The display label can be different from the name of the entity as configured for entity recognition or the attribute in HTML. For example, for "pub" in the following META tag,
<META NAME="pub" CONTENT="Google">, you might use the display label "Publisher."

Attribute Name

For attributes based on entities discovered by entity recognition, the list of possible attribute names is presented in a pull-down menu.

For attributes based on metadata, the name must match the NAME attribute in a META tag.
For example, for the following META tag,
<META NAME="dept" CONTENT="sales">, the attribute name is dept and the value is sales.

By default, values are displayed by counts, in descending order. You can change how values are displayed by using the sorting options.

For attributes of type STRING, dynamic navigation supports attributes with multiple values, for example,
<META NAME="dept" CONTENT="HR,Personnel">. To specify a separator for multivalued attributes, use the Index > Index Settings page in the Admin Console. For attributes with multiple values, dynamic navigation displays separate counts for each value, for example:

Department
HR (17)
Personnel (16)

Type

Valid types for an attribute are STRING, INTEGER, FLOAT, CURRENCY, and DATE.

Case-Insensitive Attribute

For a META tag value of type STRING, you can also indicate that the attribute value is case-insensitive by clicking the Case-Insensitive Attribute checkbox. If you do this, upper- and lower-case variants of the same value are normalized into one lower-case result and the counts are combined.

For example, the following META tags contain variants of the same information:

<META NAME="author" CONTENT="DeQuincy">
<META NAME="author" CONTENT="dequincy">

When the values are treated as case-sensitive (the default behavior), both variants appear in the results with separate counts:

Author
DeQuincy (3)
dequincy (11)

When the values are treated as case-insensitive, a single, normalized result appears with combined counts:

Author
dequincy (14)

Take note that the Case-Insensitive Attribute option does not normalize characters with diacritical marks.

Range Attribute

For META tag value types INTEGER, FLOAT, CURRENCY, and DATE, you can also indicate that the attribute is a range. An example of a DATE range is 2001-01-01 - 2002-12-31.

Date Ranges

For date range, the only format supported for display in the search results is YYYY-MM-DD. However, the search appliance can interpret the following date formats in the HTML documents or external metadata by default. If the format in html/external metadata is different, then it can be configured under Metadata Indexing Configurations on the Index >Index Settings page.

Non-Overlapping Ranges

Google recommends that ranges should not be overlapping, as shown in the following example of overlapping INTEGER ranges:

50-100
100-200

If ranges overlap, counts are inaccurate because document counts will include documents that belong to both ranges. For example a document with an attribute value of 100 is counted in both ranges in the previous example and the following counts appear in the search results:

50-100 (1)
100-200 (1)

For the INTEGER type attribute, you can define non-overlapping ranges, such as:

50-99
100-199

For the DATE type attribute, you can define non-overlapping ranges, such as:

2010-03-01 - 2010-03-31
2010-04-01 - 2010-04-30

For the FLOAT and CURRENCY type attributes, you can define non-overlapping ranges, such as:

50-99.9999
100-199.9999
200-299.9999

You can provide more precision as appropriate. The display is truncated to only 2 places after decimal point.
So, these ranges appear in search results as:

50-99.99 (2)
100-199.99 (3)
200-299.99 (1)

Default Ranges

For all range types, a default range is added for documents lying outside the highest value in the range. For example, consider the following INTEGER ranges:

50-99
100-199

If a document has an attribute value of 200, a range of 200 or more is added to the search results.

Consider the the following DATE ranges:

2010-03-01 - 2010-03-31
2010-04-01 - 2010-04-30

If a document has an attribute value of 2010-05-01, a range of 2010-05-01 or later is added to the search results.

For INTEGER, FLOAT and CURRENCY type ranges, if the lowest range does not start with 0, then a range from 0 to the lowest value is added in the search results. For example, consider the following INTEGER ranges:

50-99
100-199

Because the lowest range begins with 50, a range from 49 or less is added to the search results.

For DATE ranges, if the lowest range does not start with 1900-01-01, then a range from 1900-01-01 to lowest value is added in the search results. For example, consider the following DATE ranges: defined like:

2010-03-01 - 2010-03-31
2010-04-01 - 2010-04-30

Because the lowest range begins with 2010-03-01, a range of  2010-02-28 or earlier is added to the search results.

Sorting Options

The non-range type attributes can be configured to be sorted by their values or by the counts of the values and in descending or ascending order. The default selection is to sort by count in descending order.

Dynamic Navigation for Secure Search

With dynamic navigation for secure search, the search appliance only uses documents that the user is authorized to see to generate navigation options. Only attributes and values that are in the accessible documents appear in the options and the counts include only the accessible documents.

To use dynamic navigation for secure search, enable it for a configuration and select one of the following authorization modes:

• Fast authorization mode
• All authorization mode

For information about how to enable dynamic navigation for secure search, see "Creating a New Configuration and Adding Attributes."

Fast Authorization Mode

In fast authorization mode, the search appliance only performs authorization based on Access Control Lists (ACLs) and checks results that are
already available in cache to generate dynamic navigation options. It ignores documents that require real-time authorization. If the search appliance ignores some documents, it indicates this with a greater than sign (>) in the count that appears with the dynamic navigation options.

Google recommends using fast authorization mode, which is the default mode.

All Authorization Mode

In all authorization mode, the search appliance uses all types of authorization methods to generate dynamic navigation options. If ACLs are not the primary method of authorization, users might receive query timeout errors (500) when performing searches. If this happens, you might consider using fast authorization mode instead.

Google recommends using all authorization mode only under the following conditions:

• Real-time authorization on the content server is fast.
• Only 3-5% of the documents in the corpus need real-time checks.
• The rest of the documents in the corpus use ACLs for authorization.
  

Creating a New Configuration and Adding Attributes

By using the Search > Search Features > Dynamic Navigation page, you can perform the following tasks:

• Adding configurations
• Attributes based on metadata
• Adding attributes based on entities discovered by entity recognition
• Applying configurations to different front ends

Adding Configurations

To add a new configuration:

1. Click Search > Search Features > Dynamic Navigation.
2. Under Existing Configurations, click Add.
3. In the Name box, type a name for the new configuration.
4. Click Create.

Adding Attributes Based on Metadata

To add a new attribute based on metadata in your content source:

1. Under Attributes, click Add.
   
2. In the Display Label box, type the label for the attribute.
3. In the Attribute Name box, type the name of the attribute.
4. Select the attribute type from the Type pull-down menu.
5. If the type is STRING, click Case-Insensitive Attribute, if appropriate.
   If the type is INTEGER, FLOAT, CURRENCY, or DATE, click Range Attribute, if appropriate.
   
6. If the attribute is a Range Attribute, then provide the range values. No sorting options are available for range attributes. The values appear in the order entered.
   If the attribute is not a Range Attribute, then select the sorting options for the attribute. You can select to sort the attribute values by either counts or by values themselves and in ascending or descending order.
   
7. Click OK.
8. To add more attributes in this configuration, repeat steps 1 to 7.

Adding Attributes Based on Entities Discovered by Entity Recognition

Entity recognition automatically discovers entities in documents and stores these entities as metadata in the search index.

To add a new attribute based on an entity discovered by entity recognition:

1. Under Attributes, click Add Entity.
2. In the Display Label box, enter the entity name that you want displayed in the dynamic navigation menu.
3. From the Attribute Name drop-down menu, select the entity name.
4. From the Type drop-down menu, select the entity type.
5. Select options for sorting entities in the dynamic navigation panel.
6. Click OK.
7. To add more attributes in this configuration, repeat steps 1 to 6.

Applying Configurations to Front Ends

To apply a configuration to a front end:

1. Under Front Ends, apply the configuration to one or more front ends by selecting a front end names from the Available Front Ends box. Selecting them moves them to the Added Front Ends box. To remove the added front ends, select them in the Added Front Ends box and they will move back to the Available Front Ends box.
   The front ends added to one configuration are not available in other configurations.
2. Optionally, to use secure dynamic navigation, click Enable dynamic navigation for secure search under More Options and select one of the following authorization modes:
   • Use only fast authorization
   • Use all types of authorization
3. To create the configuration, click Create.

After this step, the search appliance starts computing the dynamic navigation results for the selected front ends but does not yet show the results on the search pages. However, you can see the dynamic navigation results in the search XML output. To display the dynamic navigation results on the search page, follow the procedure in Showing Dynamic Navigation in a Front End.

Changing the Order of Attributes

In the navigation options that are presented to the user, attributes appear in the same order as in the Attributes section of the configuration. You can change the order of attributes in the configuration by using drag and drop.

Editing a Configuration

For any saved configuration, you can edit its name, attributes, or added front ends. For attributes in a configuration, you edit display label, attribute name, type, range values, or sorting options.

To edit a configuration:

1. Under Existing Configurations, click the Edit link next to the configuration that you want to edit.
2. Optionally, to edit the configuration name, change the string in the Name box.
3. Optionally, to edit an attribute, click the Edit link next to the attribute name and:
1. Make changes to the selected attribute.
2. Click OK.
4. Optionally, change the order of attributes.
5. Optionally, front ends can be added or removed from the configuration by selecting them from the Available Front Ends box or the Added Front Ends box.
6. Optionally, under More Options, edit the settings for dynamic navigation for secure search.
7. Click Save.

Deleting a Configuration

To delete a configuration:

1. Under Existing Configurations, click the Delete link next to the configuration that you want to delete.
2. In the confirmation box, click OK.

Deleting an Attribute

To delete an attribute:

1. Under Existing Configurations, click the Edit link next to the configuration with the attribute that you want to delete.
2. Under Attributes, click the Delete link next to the attribute name.
3. Click Save.

Showing Dynamic Navigation in a Front End

After enabling dynamic navigation, creating a configuration with some attributes, and applying the configuration to a front end, you can show dynamic navigation with search results in a specific front end.

To show dynamic navigation in a front end:

1. Click Search > Search Features > Front Ends and click Edit for a particular front end.
2. In the Page Layout Helper box on the Output Format tab, select the Search Results section.
3. Click Show Dynamic Navigation.
4. Click Save.

Using Dynamic Navigation with GSA Unification

To use dynamic navigation with GSA unification, you need to have the same front end and the same dynamic navigation attributes configured on all nodes. Also, you need to add a dynamic navigation enabled front end as a remote front end in the master node configuration.

Configuring Query Expansion for Dynamic Navigation

The search appliance enables you to configure query expansion for configured dynamic navigation attributes.

To configure query expansion for dynamic navigation:

1. Click Search > Search Features > Query Settings.
2. Under Add Query Expansion File, click Synonyms.
3. For Language, select either all or the particular desired language.
4. Browse to a synonyms file containing synonyms for dynamic navigation attributes
5. Click Apply Settings.
6. Click Search > Search Features > Front Ends.
7. Click the Edit link next to the front end for which dynamic navigation has been applied and which needs attributes names synonyms.
8. Select the Filters tab.
9. For Query Expansion Policy for Meta Tags, select Names only from the menu.
10. Click Save.

Dynamic Navigation starts using these synonyms in its calculations for a query against that front end.

Feature Limitations

For feature limitations, see "Specifications and Usage Limits," which is linked to the Google Search Appliance help center.

For More Information

For more information about dynamic navigation, see "Creating the Search Experience: Best Practices," which is linked to the Google Search Appliance help center.