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Since 2013 the Help Center search includes privilege pages. The search results seem to be network-wide, with site url placeholders. The shared search index is an issue for the reduced ads privilege, which is only active on a subset of sites since the other sites don't have leader board ads (above posts) which are targeted by the privilege. Therefore, for example on TeX.SE https://tex.stackexchange.com/help/search?q=advertisements returns a search result for https://tex.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/reduced-ads, including a content preview for that search result, but the linked page doesn't exist and redirects to the general privileges page.

This mismatch is very confusing when trying to find information on the privilege for a particular site if you already know something about it from other sites.

The issue is similar to "Secret" Documentation Privileges on sites other than SO but there the privilege, and the page describing it, wasn't only searchable but it actually did exist (while it shouldn't have), even though it wasn't listed on the privilege overview page.

It is also somewhat related to Privilege/FAQ pages should not show ad reduction privilege on SE sites that don't actually show ads which shows that the privilege can exist for sites that don't have ads (Meta.SE in that case).

In any case I think it is a bug and the search results should not show an excerpt and a link for a page/privilege that does not exist for the site that the search is performed on.

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  • It looks like this functionality stopped working correctly. Commented May 4, 2023 at 23:55
  • My guess is that this never worked correctly @Sonic, the privilege is hidden from the list, the url redirects, you cannot track it in your profile, the only thing it is not hidden from is search results, which is either an oversight when hiding the privilege was implemented or it is unavoidable because of the way the help center search is implemented (I suspect the latter, but still a bug).
    – Marijn
    Commented May 5, 2023 at 6:57
  • Based on the pattern of bug reports I've seen filed for help center search, it looks like the search index is not rebuilt automatically and needs to be manually rebuilt to fix any changes to pages. Commented May 5, 2023 at 7:03
  • If that is indeed the issue then that would be an easy solution. However I am not sure there actually have been (relevant) changes to the privilege pages on sites that don't have the reduce ads privilege, this was never there on those sites so the search index should not have indexed them at all.
    – Marijn
    Commented May 5, 2023 at 8:18
  • I think the issue is different: although I'm not sure I guess that the search uses some network-wide collection of help center articles and privilege pages, and then inserts site-specific urls when the search results are displayed. This should however be filtered such that only actually existing pages are displayed in search results for individual sites.
    – Marijn
    Commented May 5, 2023 at 8:19

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