Options overview

All options live at AdminCP > Setup > Options > [MC] Search Analytics. They are grouped into the sections below.

Section	Settings
General	Master switch, privacy posture, retention, excluded groups, branding.
Processing	Buffer batching, rollup and prune chunking, clustering.
Surfacing	Trending detection thresholds.
Widgets	Public widget cache, frequency floor, and member participation policy.

General

Setting	Default	What it does
Enable capturing	On	Master switch. When off, no searches are captured and no rollup or pruning runs.
Capture these search types	post, thread	Only searches of the ticked types are recorded. All registered content types with a search handler appear here automatically; _global (unscoped) is always captured.
Minimum query length	3	Searches shorter than this are ignored.
Excluded user groups	(empty)	Searches by members of these groups are never captured.
Capture guest searches	On	When off, only logged-in members are recorded.
Attribute searches to users	On	When on, captured rows store the user id. Turn off for full anonymisation.
Hash guest IPs	On	When on, guest searches store a SHA-256 IP hash. Off means no IP is stored at all.
Raw log retention	30 days	How many days of raw rows are kept before pruning.
Aggregate retention	730 days	How many days of pseudonymised aggregate rows are kept.
Remove branding	Off	Removes the "Powered by [MC] Search Analytics" footer text.

Processing

Setting	Default	What it does
Write buffer size	50 entries	Captured rows batched in memory before a single multi-row insert. Higher means fewer database round-trips; lower means less risk of losing buffered rows on a crash.
Write buffer max age	30 seconds	Buffered rows are also flushed when the oldest reaches this age.
Enable intent clustering	On	Groups near-duplicate queries during the daily rollup.
Clustering stopword languages	English	Stopword lists applied during signature generation. Enable additional languages for multilingual boards.
Minimum cluster size	2 queries	Clusters with fewer distinct member queries are kept but flagged low confidence.
Rollup chunk size	5000 rows	Maximum aggregate rows processed per pass of the Daily rollup cron entry.
Retention prune chunk size	10000 rows	Maximum rows deleted per pass of the Retention prune cron entry.

Surfacing

Setting	Default	What it does
Enable trending detection	On	Identifies queries gaining velocity by comparing each period against the average of the previous four periods.
Minimum searches for trending	5 searches	Queries with fewer searches than this in the current period are excluded from trending.

Widgets

Setting	Default	What it does
Widget cache lifetime	900 seconds	How long public widget payloads stay in the data registry before recomputation.
Widget frequency floor	3 searches	Queries with fewer total searches than this are hidden from public widgets. Prevents single-user queries leaking into the public surface.
Allow members to opt out of public widgets	On	When on, a checkbox appears on each member's account privacy page letting them exclude their searches from public widget totals. Disable to force all member searches to contribute regardless of preference.
Members opt in by default (sub-option)	On	Only applies when the parent is on. When on, new and existing accounts contribute their searches unless the member unchecks the preference.