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How search works (finding things)

The platform's search boxes all run against a search index (an Elasticsearch back end), not directly against the database. That has a few consequences worth understanding, because they explain both how to find things quickly and why a record you know exists sometimes doesn't come back. This page covers the behaviour shared by the main search bar and the PIM product search; the screens themselves are described in the product catalogue and the document search view.

The "Search for anything" box in the header searches everything at once and returns results grouped by type: deals, contacts, companies, documents, products, news, and contact groups. The radio buttons below it (All, plus one per type) narrow the display to a single group. Which groups appear depends on what the site has enabled.

What each group matches, in practice:

  • Deals — the supplier's name (matched anywhere in the name), product range and keywords, and — when you type a number — the deal's PSA ID or internal reference. Typing part of a supplier name is the fastest way to a deal.
  • Companies — matched from the start of the company name or known-as name, plus company keywords.
  • Contacts — first name, surname, company, and phone numbers; every word you type must match (see below). Only active contacts.
  • Products, documents, news — free-text over their indexed fields.

Quick wins

  • Partial words work. The boxes add a wildcard for you, so joh finds Johnson and widg finds Widget. You don't need to type the whole word.
  • Every word must match (AND). Typing two or more words returns only records that contain all of them. blue widget will not find a product that is only "blue" or only "widget". This is the single most common reason a search comes back empty — including when one word is a typo. If in doubt, search the one most distinctive word.
  • Search by number. For deals, a PSA ID or internal reference typed as digits jumps straight to the deal.
  • Case doesn't matter. NBG, nbg, and Nbg are equivalent.
  • Distinctive words beat common ones. One unusual word (a product code, an unusual surname) narrows faster than several common ones and avoids the all-words trap.
  • Use the type filter. If you know you want a company, switch the radio to Companies so deals and contacts don't crowd the list.
  • For structured searches, use the filters, not the box. The product catalogue and document search have dedicated supplier / category / date / status filters that are exact and combinable — more reliable than typing everything into one box.

Why some results are missing

When something you expect isn't there, it is almost always one of these:

  • You can only find what you're allowed to see. Every search applies your own permissions silently — deals, documents, companies, and contacts are all filtered to what your roles grant. A colleague with broader access will legitimately see more, and nothing tells you a result was filtered out. On sites with category security, members are further limited to their own deal categories.
  • All your words have to match. As above — a single extra or mistyped word can drop the result to nothing. Remove words rather than adding them.
  • Company names match from the start. A word from the middle of a company name finds that company's deals but not the company row itself. Search the beginning of the name for the company.
  • Only active / published records. Contact search returns active contacts only; product search returns active, processed products. Discontinued, inactive, or still-importing records won't appear here (the catalogue's Active toggle governs this for products).
  • Results are capped. The main bar shows up to 25 per type, and the product list is paged. If your term is too broad the one you want may be past the cap — narrow the search rather than scrolling.
  • Newly added or edited records lag. Because search reads the index, a record that was just created, imported, or edited may not appear until it has been re-indexed (usually seconds, occasionally longer). If a record is correct in its own screen but missing from search, the index simply hasn't caught up. This is also why an edit can show in one place and not yet in search.
  • The type may be switched off. Sites can disable whole result groups (for example Documents or News) from search; if a group never appears for anyone, it is turned off for the site.

A note on quotes and AND/OR

The search engine underneath does support quoted phrases ("exact phrase") and the words AND / OR in the free-text product, document, and news searches. They can be useful, but because the boxes automatically append a wildcard to help partial matching, quotes and operators occasionally interfere with it and suppress matches. If a quoted or AND/OR search returns nothing, retry with the plain words — and for anything you need to be exact and repeatable, prefer the structured filters on the catalogue and document-search screens over the free-text box.

Facet lists can be capped too

In the product catalogue, the sidebar facet lists (suppliers, ranges, manufacturers, categories) are built from the current results and are themselves limited to a top slice (the most frequent values). A rarely-used value can therefore be absent from a facet list even though products carrying it exist — filter or search toward it directly rather than expecting it in the list.

What this is not

  • Not a permissions bypass — search never widens access; it only ever shows a subset of what you could already open.
  • Not a live view of the database — it reflects the index, which trails edits slightly. A screen that reads the database directly (a record's own page, the document library) is the source of truth when the two disagree.