Using search facets to find what’s there – and what’s not

EMC Support contains a wealth of information about our many products. There are hundreds of thousands of documents, downloads, and other assets available for searching. It can feel like you’re searching for a needle in a haystack, at times. EMC Support has a number of tools you can use to narrow your search – but not everyone knows about them, or uses the full range of features.

Let’s take facets – the filters on the left of the Search results page. They let you filter your results in the same way as the “Scope by resource” drop-down – but after your search has returned results.

naviseccli-facet-filters-compare.png

So, what can facets on the left do for you?



Facets give you more visibility into the results of your search. They allow you to drill down into product families, as well as choose date ranges (last day, last week, last month, or last year). And in some cases, they reveal results that may be obscured by erroneous resource scoping.

Let’s take a very common search for “naviseccli”. Each week, we see this search – and it’s consistently one of the leading “zero results” searches. Why is that? Partly because many searchers are looking under Downloads for “naviseccli”, but it’s actually categorized as a Support Tool.

naviseccli-results-in-ST.png

Suppose you’re searching for Navisphere Secure CLI (Solaris x64) for CLARiiON. If you search for “naviseccli” and Scope by Downloads you’ll get no results. If you look at the facets on the left, you’ll see that there are no results under Downloads. However you will see that there are results under Support Tools.

And when you click the Support Tools facet, it expands to show the products and product families which match your search. In this case, you’ll see a number of CLARiiON Navisphere assets (4 to be exact):

naviseccli-results-facet-choices.png

So, the next time you’re searching EMC Support, but you see the “No Results Found” message, check the facets on the left.

Your results might really be there – just not in the place you expected.

Kay Stoner

Principal Program Manager – Search Lead, Online Support

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About the Author: Kay Stoner