What is the use of Search group?

[Mrigank Gupta]

What is the use of Search Group.   In my developer instance these are the below search groups present by default. I disabled the Search group named "task" which covers all the Task related tables.

After this i tried to search a specific Incident and it worked in the global search. As per few discussions on Search group in the community I understood that it helps in searching the records. But I am able to do it even after disabling the related group.

What is the exact role of search group then?

[ChrisBurks]

Hi Mrigank,

The search group is used to group things that may be similar or contain the keyword that is being searched into their respective groups not for a specific item. If the search finds a direct match there isn't a need to group anything. It would take you directly to the record.

The better way to test this is to perform a search of a generic keyword. Do this both with the search group active and deactivated. You should see a difference in the results.

[Mrigank Gupta]

I tried searching for an Incident with task search group active. I then made it inactive and search another incident. IN both the case I found the incident and didn;t see any difference in behaviour. Am I missing anything? Should I do it on any newly created table?

[ChrisBurks · Accepted solution]

The difference is that you're searching for a specific record (in your case incident).

If   a search finds a specific record it takes you to the record directly. There isn't any need to "group" the search. A "search group" does what it says. It groups results in the case that a specific record isn't found.

For instance if I search for INC001001 and that record exists, the system will take me directly to that record. It won't have to group anything because the result is that it takes me directly to that record.

However, let's say that I perform a search on "mail" and that keyword exists on 5 incidents, 2 knowledge articles, and maybe 4 problem records. If I have a search group for those types of records then the system will group those records in the respective types; The incident and problem records will be grouped under the search group tasks and the knowledge articles under the search group knowledge.

But if I deactivate the task search group it won't display any records that match the keyword in the search results in the case there isn't a direct record match.

Here's a screencast to demonstrate.

search_group_demo