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Quick links

Quick links are direct links to important sub-pages of a home page and can be displayed as part of the result summary. Quick links are normally only used when providing a multi-site search such as a whole of university search. The search result can also include an optional search box that restricted to the specific site displayed for the search result.

For example a search for the University of Sydney might produce the following search result. Entering a search into the search box will run a search restricted to pages from the Sydney Conservatorium of Music website.

quick links 01

Configuration

Enabling quick links is a two-step process. It requires configuration of any data sources to generate the collapsing indexes, and results page configuration to display the collapsed results.

See the 'quicklinks' section of Data source and search package options for the relevant configuration settings

Data source configuration

To generate the quick links:

  1. Select the data source then manage the data source configuration.

  2. Enable quick links

  3. Update or re-index the data source

Results page configuration

Quick links can be displayed on several results pages with different display settings such as different link depths.

  1. Select the results page then manage the results page configuration.

  2. Configure the quick links front-end settings

The list of quick links (for a web data source) is built during the indexing phase, each time the data source is updated. This list is built using anchor information extracted from the crawled home pages.

  • The various settings explained below allow you to fine tune the quick links detection mechanism based on word length, link title length and page depth, as well as exclude specific words.

  • The quick links mechanism is based on URLs paths found during the crawl and thus will be more efficient if the crawled website(s) uses an extensive URL scheme (e.g. http://www.example.com/news/qld/sports/), and less efficient if the crawled website(s) uses dynamic URLs instead (e.g. http://www.example.com/news.php?loc=qld&cat=sports).

The display of quick links can be customized in search result pages by using the <@s.Quicklinks> and <@s.QuickRepeat> tags.

Customization example

The following example is the default quick links presentation as set in the default template. It will display the quick links in an unordered list, with an additional list item allowing to restrict the search on the matching domain only:

<@s.Quicklinks>
  <ul class="fb-quicklinks">
    <@s.QuickRepeat><li><a href="${s.ql.url}" title="${s.ql.text}">${s.ql.text}</a></li></@s.QuickRepeat>
    <li class="fb-quicklinks-more">
      <a href="?meta_u_sand=${s.result.quickLinks.domain}&${QueryString}">More results from <span>${s.result.quickLinks.domain}<span></a>
    </li>
  </ul>
</@s.Quicklinks>

Quick links are returned (where available) in the quickLinks sub-element for a search result.

e.g.

{
    "response": {
        "resultPacket": {
            "details": {},
            "query": "tax",
            "queryAsProcessed": "[tax taxes]",

            ...

            "spell": null,
            "bestBets": [ ],
            "results": [
            {
            "rank": 1,
            "score": 889,
            "title": "Home page | Australian Taxation Office",

            ...

            "exploreLink": null,
            "kmFromOrigin": null,
            "quickLinks": {
                "domain": "www.ato.gov.au/",
                "quickLinks": [
                    {
                    "text": "ato",
                    "url": "https://www.ato.gov.au/"
                    },
                    {
                    "text": "Legal Database",
                    "url": "https://www.ato.gov.au/Law/"
                    },
                    {
                    "text": "Individuals",
                    "url": "https://www.ato.gov.au/Individuals/"
                    },
                    {
                    "text": "Lodge online",
                    "url": "https://www.ato.gov.au/Individuals/Lodging-your-tax-return/Lodge-online/"
                    },

                    ...

                    {
                    "text": "Unpaid super",
                    "url": "https://www.ato.gov.au/Individuals/Super/Unpaid-super-from-your-employer/"
                    },
                    {
                    "text": "Your situation",
                    "url": "https://www.ato.gov.au/Individuals/Your-situation/"
                    }
                ]
            },
            "displayUrl": "https://www.ato.gov.au/",

            ...

            "customData": { }
            },
            {
            "rank": 2,
            ...
        }
    }
}

  • quickLinks.domain is used to generate the domain level search box

  • quickLinks.quickLinks[] contains the individual list of quick links that were extracted for the result.

See also