Hi folks,
There’s a group in my institution that wants to be assured people will be able to find their group when users search for their public facing name as opposed to the true group name that appears in URLs.
Some preliminary testing by me suggested that this is true, but I wanted to check since I can’t seem to find it in the documentation.
Thanks!
Hey Rob,
Thanks for writing – I’m not sure exactly what you mean by “searchable,” if you’re talking about within the calendar search or from a more general “searching on Google/Bing/etc” standpoint? If it’s the latter, provided the public name appears on the page somewhere in your theming (ideally in an h1 like “{Group Public Name} Events”) I’d imagine that would be pretty likely to get indexed by search engines?
Some schools also build neat auto-updating pages like Events | Brown University that list all of their groups in a friendlier format to help make them more discoverable.
Hope this helps! Let us know if there’s more we can advise on with regards to this. Thanks,
Karl
Sorry, I can see now I wasn’t clear on exactly what I meant. I mean searchable within LiveWhale’s keyword or calendar searches. The Group’s title is currently “X & Y” (the current “true” name for the Group, not the public-facing name) but it’s changing to “Center for X and Y” (and we’ve already changed the public name to that). So they want to know that anyone searching for the “center for” version of the name will get the right Group if we don’t change the “true” name.
Ah, thanks for clarifying – yes, the group title (which uses Public Name is set) gets included in the “high” indexed words and phrases when an event is saved and its search index gets updated. A bit more about how the search index works is on this page of the docs, but the TLDR is that yep, Public Name gets considered when search results for events are calculated.
Thanks so much! Really appreciate the help. That was my sense, but it’s good to have it confirmed.