Joomla Smart Search (com_finder) is the built-in full-text search engine. It indexes all published content — articles, categories, contacts, news feeds, tags, and third-party components — into a searchable index with stemming, phrase matching, and filtering by content type, category, or date range.

Enabling Smart Search

1. Go to Admin → Extensions → Plugins and enable the Finder plugins for each content type you want indexed (Content, Categories, Tags, Contacts etc.)
2. Go to Admin → Components → Smart Search → Index and click Index to build the initial index
3. Add a Smart Search menu item or place the mod_finder module in the search position

Managing the Index

• Purge & Re-index — rebuilds from scratch, useful after bulk content changes
• Content Maps — browse the index by content type, language, and taxonomy
• Statistics — total indexed items and index size

The index updates automatically when content is saved, published, or unpublished via the Finder plugin events.

Search Filters

Preset search filters narrow results before the user types a query. Go to Smart Search → Search Filters → New and configure:

• Content type (articles only, contacts only etc.)
• Category
• Language
• Author
• Date range

Assign a filter to a Smart Search menu item to create a scoped search page — e.g. a News-only search.

Search Module

Place mod_finder in the search position. Key params: