Indexing and searching for hashtags and usertags

This article shows how to configure Funnelback to enable a user to search for hashtags and usertags.

By default Funnelback will strip out punctuation when indexing and processing user queries.

When searching social media content it is often desirable to allow a user to search for social tags such as #hashtags and @usertags.

This article shows how to configure Funnelback to index these tags, and also to provide the ability to for users to search using these tags.

The hook scripts from the following steps can also be used to enable hashtag/usertag searching for twitter collections. Note: you will need to update either the twitter collection’s metadata mappings to use hashTag and userTag as the metadata class names for the respective fields, or update the pre process hook script to reference the correct metadata classes.

Download the code used in this article from the Funnelback GitHub site