Sometimes, finding content across a website can be tricky. We know the site contains articles and modules and so on but we don't always enable the search function on websites for a variety of reasons. It doesn't matter what those reasons are right now, suffice to say that sometimes you may need to go looking for particular words across the whole website so that you can remove them or change them. Most of these words will be found in the articles that you have created for your website and one very quick way to go looking for particular words (or strings of words or numbers) is to use the Context Search facility within the Article Manager.
6.16.1 Where will I find this?
When you are in Article Manager ( via Content > Articles), you will always see the Search feature at the top of the page:
In the search field, normally you would type in a word and when you click on the magnifying glass icon, any articles with that word in the title or in their alias will be displayed. Here we are searching for articles with school in their titles or aliases:
But what if you wanted to look for the word "documents" across all articles? Simply putting the word documents into the search field will probably generate few if any valid results. So, if you want to find which articles include the word documents, you should use a different technique when using the search field. This is where the context search comes into play.
6.16.2 The Context Search facility
To use the context search facility, you still use the search field but you use a format as shown:
content:[yoursearchtext]
Example: we are looking for the word school INSIDE all articles:
The results are (in my example):
You will notice that the titles and aliases of the articles in the results list might not include the word school at all but we can be confident that if the articles are edited we will indeed, somewhere, find the word school so that we can edit or change that word.