How does Valid Email Checker's help-center search work?

Both surfaces of help-center search inside Valid Email Checker — the search on the marketing-site help center and the search inside the in-app support widget — call the same backend: a Supabase edge function called search-help-articles. The function looks at every active, public article in our knowledge base and assigns each one a score against your query. The top five highest-scoring articles come back as the result set.

How the score is built

The ranking algorithm is Docusaurus-style. For each search term you typed (after splitting on whitespace and lowercasing), every article earns points if:

• Exact title match — 100 points. The article title is exactly the query you typed.
• Title contains the term — 50 points per term. The query word appears anywhere in the title.
• Keyword tag match — 30 points per term. The query matches one of the article's keywords array.
• Summary contains the term — 20 points per term. The query word appears in the article description.
• Content contains the term — 2 points per occurrence, capped at 20 per term. Match frequency in the body counts but cannot dominate.
• Exact phrase bonus — 80 points (title) / 40 (summary) / 30 (content) if the *whole* query string appears as a phrase in that field.
• Priority boost — half a point per priority unit. Articles flagged as more important pull slightly ahead on ties.

Why this ranking shape

Title and exact-phrase matches win because that is what users almost always mean. If you type "how to enable 2FA", the article titled "How to enable 2FA" should come first — and it does. Content matches add nuance: an article that does not mention "2FA" in its title but covers authenticator apps in its body still surfaces for queries like "lost authenticator", just not at the top. Keyword tags let us hand-tune ranking without rewriting titles.

Snippet generation

Each result also includes a short snippet around the first matching word inside the article body. About 50 characters before and after the match, with ellipses on either side. That is what you see under the title in the result card. Snippets help you tell at a glance whether the article is going to answer your specific question or just covers an adjacent topic.

What is excluded from search

Articles flagged is_public = false or is_active = false in the database never appear in either surface. These are typically internal drafts, deprecated articles, or content that is being rewritten. You will never accidentally land on a stale article via search.