User Documentation Smart Search is Joomla's built-in advanced search component (com_finder). It pre-indexes your site's content so visitors get fast, filterable results instead of a slow live database search. This section covers getting it running, tuning it for larger sites, customising how results are displayed, and reference material for configuration, common questions, and testing.
Setting Up Smart Search
The core steps to get Smart Search indexing and serving results, plus the settings and considerations that matter most as your site grows.
- Smart Search Quickstart – Enabling the search plugins, running the indexer, and exposing search to visitors through a module or menu item.
- Smart Search Options – The global Search and Index configuration settings, from result display preferences to indexing weight and batch size.
- Smart Search Indexing – Running the indexer automatically, from the toolbar or the command line, including cron jobs and memory settings for larger indexing jobs.
- Smart Search on Large Sites – Avoiding timeouts on big sites with the command-line indexer, tuning batch size and memory, and knowing when a standalone search engine like Solr might suit you better.
Customising and Testing
Adjusting how results look, answers to common questions, and a test plan for confirming Smart Search keeps working as your content changes.
- Smart Search Layout Overrides – Customising the search results page through its five layout files: default, form, results, result, and sorting.
- Smart Search FAQs – Answers to common questions about what Smart Search offers over basic search, and how it handles performance, multilingual sites, and faceted search.
- Smart Search Test Plan – A testing framework covering articles, categories, contacts, news feeds, and web links, for confirming indexing keeps up as content, state, taxonomy, and access levels change.