Content Extraction

The Site Search 360 crawler analyzes your site structure to select the perfect search result titles and images automatically. For example, the first H1 tag on your page (//h1) is usually taken as the title, and if you have an og:image meta tag, that will become your search result thumbnail. If our default choices aren't to your liking, though, you have several options to fully customize your search results. You will find these options under Data Structuring > Content Extraction.

How do I change my search result titles?

You can use CSS selectors or XPath to adjust your search result titles.

For CSS, simply open the circular menu top right and turn on Prefer CSS.

Prefer CSS

Otherwise, enter the XPath expression that points to your desired title.

Enter a URL from your site under Test extraction to confirm the new title is extracted. If everything looks good, go ahead and re-index your site.

How do I control what images are displayed in search results?

If you do not like the images we have automatically selected for your search result thumbnails, or if you see a striped background (indicating no suitable image was detected—we ignore icons, footer logos, and images set as background property in CSS), you have a few options.

  1. If you want to show a specific thumbnail for every result page, you can define it by adding or updating the Open Graph (og:image) meta tags with the desired image on your webpages. Your SEO plugin or CMS will likely offer this functionality, the same images would be shown when you share links from your website in social media and messengers. You can learn more about Open Graph tags. Once you have the meta tags set up, you'll simply need to re-index your site for the crawler to pick them up.

  2. Even easier, you can use CSS selectors or XPath just like you did for your titles above. Enter the XPath expression that points to your desired thumbnail image under Image Extraction > Image XPath.

  1. If your pages do not have suitable images, you can use a placeholder image, such as your logo, to show for all search results. In the Search Designer, navigate to Layout > Result Thumbnails > Show placeholder image. Now simply enter the URL to the desired placeholder image.

To change this in your configuration directly, use this:

results: {placeholderImage: "https://placekitten.com/200/300"}

4. You can get rid of empty image containers by setting the placeholderImage parameter to null, it goes under results in your ss360Config code:

var ss360Config = {...results: {placeholderImage: null}

How do I include multiple images in my search results?

If you want to display two or more images for one search result, you can set this up with Alternative Image Extraction.

You'll need to point our crawler to the alternative images displayed on your site under Content Extraction > Alternative images XPath. Here is an example of how results can look after configuring it:

Main image:

Alternative image:

How do I change the content in my search results?

Just like with titles and images, you can use CSS selectors or XPath to include or exclude specific content from your pages in your search results. Common examples of site sections to exclude would be headers, footers, navigation, etc., which our crawler might pick up but which are not search relevant.