Is it possible for Quarto's search to exclude certain parts of a web page from the search index?

[nickvigilante]

Description

We have several pages across our docs that embed Jupyter notebook cells, and the Quarto search functionality indexes the output of these cells by default, as I would expect it to. However, there are a lot of unnecessary search results when I try to search for a term contained in one of these cell outputs.

Is there an OOTB way via the default Quarto search to suppress a specific div or span from the search results, either via class or shortcode option?

Some ideas of what I'd be looking for are as follows:

::: {.search-ignore}

{{< embed path/to/notebook.ipynb#cell echo=true >}}

:::

<!-- search off -->

{{< embed path/to/notebook.ipynb#cell echo=true >}}

<!-- search on -->

{{< embed path/to/notebook.ipynb#cell echo=true search-index=false >}}

I know Algolia can exclude certain parts of a web page from the search index, but I thought I'd see if the default search can do the same.

[mcanouil]

See https://quarto.org/docs/websites/website-search.html, probably the "tagFilters".

[nickvigilante]

Yep, sure thing. But do you have any other suggestions about how I might be able to work around our problem? I thought about the comment approach (<!-- search on -->/<!-- search off -->), but I realize we strip comments, so that might not work. Wondering if this might just be an enhancement we log to add a class that excludes a specific div or span from being searched. What are your thoughts?

[cscheid]

I don't have a suggestion, no. You can file an enhancement request.

[mcanouil]

Note that you can already add classes to code cells or eventually surround a code cell with a div.
Not sure how to tell Algolia to exclude those though as it seems tagFilters is to filter in not out.

[nickvigilante]

We're not using Algolia, we're using the OOTB Quarto search. I'm trying to figure out how to exclude certain blocks from the OOTB Quarto search.

[cscheid]

FWIW the code that builds/updates Quarto's search indexes is src/project/types/website/website-search.ts, specifically updateSearchIndex. That would be the place for a PR to start.

[mcanouil]

Tracked in:

• Add a class that excludes blocks of text from being added to the OOTB Quarto search index (search.json) #11189