We Know Joomla 2.5 had Releases with well organized and increasingly contain a lot of great improvements. One the most important of those features was a brand new search extension: Smart Search. In this tutorial we're going to focus on How to Use Joomla 2.5 Smart Search.

Step 1: Go to Extensions > Plug-in Manager and enable the Smart Search plugin.

Step 2: Go to Components > Smart Search and click Index in the toolbar. When you're finished, you'll see all of the indexed content.

Step 3: Now that your content is in Smart Search, go to Extensions > Module Manager and place your Smart Search module live on your site. There is also an Advanced Search feature to allow people to drill down more accurately.

Step 4: Click on the Advanced Search and you'll be presented with the ability to filter your search by Author, Category, Country, Language, Region and Type.

Step 5: Go to Components > Smart Search and click Content Maps and you'll see your site content divided into Articles, Categories, Contacts, News feeds and Web links.

Step 6: Go to Components > Smart Search > Search Filters and click New. You can create a filters with any or all of the Authors, Categories, Countries, Languages, Regions and Types that we saw before. You can also filter by date.

Step 7: Go to Menus > Main Menu and click New. Choose Smart Search > Search.

Step 8: Inside Components > Smart Search > Options there are a lot of configuration settings available. Click on Index and you can also change the weight given to different factors in the search results.

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