The search tab lets you locate items in your account from just about any page within your helpdesk. It is available in the top right corner (near the 'New' icon), in every tab.
Agents can search through all the information that is accessible to them. For example, if an agent can see only the tickets belonging to her group, her search will be performed only within that group.
Every time you enter a search query, Freshdesk will search across tickets, solution articles, forum posts and customers (contacts and companies), and in the following items within the broader categories:
- Tickets - subject lines, descriptions, notes, replies, ticket fields, tags, attachment names
- Contacts/companies - names, emails, phone numbers, contact fields
- Solution articles - Titles, descriptions, tags, attachment names
- Forums - Titles, posts
You can also search for tickets, contacts, solutions or forums specifically by clicking on the respective icon.
Quick search view
As soon as you start entering the search query, Freshdesk will show you the most relevant results (tickets, companies, forums,etc.) in the spotlight.
You can make use of the pills/buttons to quickly see more results for a particular category.
Certain strings might be present in the description of the ticket all the time (booking status or flight confirmation etc). Or in ticket properties (order id) - you can use search preferences to narrow down your search to just these properties.
Tip: If you are searching for a particular ticket and you remember the properties of the ticket, the best way to locate it would be using the filters in the ticket list page.
Extensive search
After you hit enter, you will be taken to the search results page where all results under each category will be displayed along with the number of results. The tickets will be sorted based on relevance by default. For example, certain strings might be present in the description of the ticket all the time (booking status or flight confirmation, etc). Or in ticket properties (order id) - you can use search preferences to narrow down your search to just these properties.
In each result available, you can see the following information -
| Category | Information seen in the search results |
| Tickets | Ticket subject and description Requester Ticket created time Assigned agent Status and priority |
| Solutions | Title of the article The folder in which the article is created Truncated content Author of the article Last published time |
| Forums | Topic name Forum name Post content Topic creator Topic created time |
| Customers | Company name Contact name |
Understanding your search results
When you enter multiple keywords, Freshdesk performs an OR search on the keywords in a starts-with mechanism. For example, when you are searching for jet propulsion, the search results will include:
- Items containing the phrase 'jet propulsion'
- Items containing 'jet' and 'propulsion' separately
- Items containing variations of the word 'jet' like 'jetpack' or 'Jetson' and containing variations of the word 'propulsion' like 'propulsions'
But items containing the words 'propel' or 'propellant' or 'propulsive' will not appear because they don't start with 'propulsion'.
Note: Both these words, separately or together should exist in the same ticket conversation or article for it to show up in the search results.
Exact search
When you search for a phrase, by default, you will see the exact match results first and the partial matches will follow. However, you can eliminate partial matches in your search results by searching for exact phrases by enclosing the search terms within double-quotes.
In the screenshot below you can see the difference between an exact search and a partial search.
Please note that the updates in tickets, contacts, etc will take a few minutes to get indexed, after which it will be available through search.