Easy Navigation and Full-Text Search

Producing detailed and thorough documentation is very important. But what if your client wants to find something on a specific subject, and all you have is a 358-page long Word or PDF document? They search for a term, get thousands of matches, or no exact matches at all, close the document and contact support. Or even drop your product altogether because they assume the feature they need is not there.

To help your readers navigate through documentation effortlessly, ClickHelp offers a number of features.

ClickHelp offers a full-text search engine customized for documentation search. You can search the entire documentation portal or just a specific set of user guides. It handles word forms and tenses to allow your readers use natural language, considers term proximity and dozens of other factors when ranking results.

Your readers will enjoy these full-text search features:

• Fuzzy search. You don’t have to guess the exact phrase — our smart search engine will find even partial marches.
• Predictive search. Start typing, and the system will immediately provide word completion suggestions for your search query.
• Automatic error correction. Typos and spelling mistakes are not a problem anymore — the search engine is smart enough to handle this.
• Search results sorting. Sort results by relevance or modification date — sometimes, you need the latest updated topic that matches your query.

For complex use cases, you can use special operators (like quotes, wildcards, etc.) in search queries.

If you create password-protected documentation, the search engine will consider user permissions when displaying the search results — restricted documents will not be there for those who don’t have the access.

To further improve search results, you can use taxonomies (index keywords) to make topics searchable by terms that are not directly in their content. For example, if there’s a topic about SSL encryption in your documentation, you can assign the “security” index keyword to it, and even if the topic doesn’t contain a single mention of “security” or any derivatives, it will still be searchable by that term.

Our search page can filter results by publications and aggregate links to a single topic found in multiple versions of a user guide to avoid duplicating search result in case of multi-version user manuals.

Companies often have a number of documents for their clients: API Documentation, User Guides, Knowledge Bases, FAQs. ClickHelp gives you a way to unite all these documents in a single online portal with strong search, navigation and your unique style. It’s more than a publishing platform – your team will work together while creating and maintaining technical documents.

This way, ClickHelp becomes the central information hub for your company clients, partners and employees.

As technology is around us, all people refer to documentation very often. That’s why it’s crucial to make help authoring tools accessible, as well as documentation itself. So, technical writers and readers with disabilities can use a tool and read the content. We clearly understand how important accessibility is in technical writing. That’s why the Reader UI in our help authoring tool is compliant with the most modern accessibility guidelines – Section 508 and WCAG 2.0 Level AA requirements. Thanks to all customization possibilities of our online documentation tool, it’s now easier to create effective and accessible documentation for readers. If you want to learn more, visit the ClickHelp Accessibility page.