Search facets

The Search faceted module is an extension of the Search module with support for facets and more advanced settings, for example, what search fields to use and user controlled sort order.

A faceted search is simply a categorised search. After the user enters a search query, a number of categories are displayed that the user can limit their search to. If there is a lot information on the website, it is also possible to categorise in several ranks. The visitor first clicks on a category and then makes another refinement via another category.

This means that the visitor is also given a list of categories (facets) in addition to the hit list. A facet can be a trademark for example. Each category shows how many hits are within this category for the specified search word. This is so that the user knows what to expect before they click further.

Example of how it works

If I search on "information", the facets I set are displayed on the right. There you see what you can still choose from.

If I initially select webpages, I filter on webpages. Webpages are now displayed with the style sheet I set, and now, for example, PDF disappears as I cannot choose PDF as I selected web pages.

Then I can continue my filtering. Now, for example, I can also choose the 3 pages that were modified last week. Now I have filtered both webpages and last modified:

To get back to more hits I can now unselect (click the Last week link again) to get to 6 webpages again. If I want to reach PDFs I have to remove the "Webpages" filtering.