Utilizing Search for Accurate Results

With the evolution of EMC’s portfolio there comes a great deal of content available to our customers and partners including knowledgebase articles, downloads, support tools, forums, and more. Leveraging EMC Online Support’s advanced search options can be a tremendous benefit for finding content that you are looking for to support and manage your EMC products. This blog will focus on providing a few tips and tricks to help you find relevant content for your needs.

Search can be accessed multiple ways. The primary way is to simply hover over the “Support” tab in the global header or access it on the https://support.emc.com  landing page in the center well.

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Searches like “error”, or “issue” will probably return many results that may not be relevant. Why? Text entered in these areas work as an “Or” statement and by default will search the full text of all content that we have from knowledgebase articles, downloads, support tools, forums, and more.  Using our example above, this would mean that anywhere the word “error” was used would return as a result!

I urge you to try using specific searches, or better yet, utilize our advanced options to specifically filter on your search results. The advanced options filter is your friend and easy to use!  Simply click on the advanced options drop down to access some useful pre-filters.

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These pre filters allow you to find content in a faster and more efficient manner. Here are some tips:

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  1. Use the product filter to narrow your results based on a specific product.
  2. Use the Boolean options to get away from the “Or” statement search. All of these words, any of these words, or this exact phrase are helpful features allowing you to narrow your results. This option is great for searches with multiple words
  3. Search within the “Full text” of the content, or simply the “Title & Abstract Only.”

After the results have been loaded, we have additional filters/facets for you. You will see facet selections that

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are particular to the collection selected. These facet options allow you to target the content by filtering the search result set based on content metadata. It’s a deeper dive into what we have available and can help narrow down your results.

Online Support Search is a unified, support-focused and tuned search. Try it out and post any feedback or questions as comments to this post.

Ryan Amin

Product Owner: Online Support (support.emc.com)

Follow us @EMCsupport

About the Author: Ryan Amin