RH9 Webhelp Search function is not working properly

Question

Hi,
My organization is using RH9 for a Webhelp project.  My company and our client are restricted to using IE9 for the online help I have created for this project, and our OS environment is Windows 7.  When I generate using the Webhelp layout, with the TOC, Index and Search options chosen, my resulting browser window shows two frames.  Left for the Contents/Index/Search and right for the content.  In the left panel, there are three links at the top for Contents, Index and Search.  When I click on the Search link, the only thing I see is the alphabet A-Z (which are links to filter items beginning with these letters (much like the index link) and a list of what I would say is garbage.  For example, if I click on H, I see items like "half 1 2 3" or "held" or "honor # 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8", etc.  If I run my cursor down this list, I notice that maybe the word honor is a link.  If clicked it brings up one of my topic pages.  I can also click on the random numbers that appear, like clicking on 3 it brings up another topic page.  The search function does not allow me to type in a search criteria, since there is no search field as well.
Do you have any suggestions for this issue?  Is this a bug, or do I need to change settings somewhere within RH9?  The same thing is happening when using this help project that is running on our clients server.  Is there any suggestion you can give to try and make this work properly?

Answer 1

Rick,  Thanks for stepping in.    I assumed that was the reason why I was not receiving the search field, and that is fine for now.  We have discussed with our client the possibility of having two different help projects one for each, but that decision was kind of put on the back burner.
However, the other issue I am having is still there and I don't quite understand why.  Since I only have clickable A-Zs for the search, and it lists links much like the Index section, I'm still seeing lists of just numbers and characters (i.e., "# 1 2 3 4 5", or "%" or "& 1 2 3 4 5" sometimes all the way up to 18 or so).  And each of these characters or numbers are clickable links as well to either page that doesn't contain that number or to nothing.
Doing a bit more research, I have noticed that a lot of these links are being picked up by the PDF file we have as part of the project.  Our help project has a link to the documented version of the help in the form of a User Guide.pdf file.  So the search is listing items from that guide like the heading numbers 1.0, 1.0.1, etc.  Also each of these are clickable links that go nowhere.  But then there is still the numbers 1, 2, etc that go to pages that don't have this anywhere on the page.
Do you have any insight as to why these types of things are being listed under Search at all?  They make that selection look very messy and unorganized.  Not professional at all.  I have checked and tested the properties settings and can't seem to find what is causing this to happen.  Any idea would be most appreciated!!