There comes a time in the life of every community where the cup of your content overflows. Your blog channels are constantly full of updates on new events, forums are full of discussions about a hopeful future, and your wikis are fortresses of knowledge buttressed by the authority of your users and administrators.

The search function of your community is a great way to find specific documents, pages, forum posts, or users. It can filter by different channel types or by the labels that you've put on individual content. But when your community grows, the volume of your content grows too, and your search results can become a challenge to navigate. Today I want to share some tips that will help you use the search function to more efficiently find what you need.

Searching for specific filetypes

Sometimes what you're looking for isn't a specific file, but a specific kind of file. Maybe you want to find all of the Word documents in all of your spaces, or dig up a variety of pdfs from several document channels. You can isolate a search to a specific file type by adding its extension to any search you make, so searching for Pecans of Darkness .pdf will bring up the pdf of your novel, but not its associated wiki of characters.

Searching by space

For administrators of communities with a lot of spaces (link to spaces article) or channels (link to channels article), it can be useful to confine search results to a single space in your community. That will let you look at project notes and similar documents without catching duplicate posts or documents in other spaces. By adding the path of the space or channel to the search string, you can ensure that the results only come from that space or channel.As a reminder, users can only search content that they have access to. If a user doesn't have access to a space, none of the channels or content from that space will appear in their searches even if they restrict the search to that space.