Overview Search by title or content is ignoring content

Hi there @mstruening ,

As far as I can tell from searching this community, you should be able to do this for content as well. I found a couple of relevant threads that back this up.

I’ve only got frontend access myself, but I think a good friend of mine @timcavey might still be online, so he might be able to run a quick test on my home base. Let me also see if @daniel.boon knows anything. It does sound like there’s a possible bug here.

What shall I test, @Blastoise186?

@mstruening I’ve had a few run ins with Insided search, so able to give some insight into how it works. But @Julian is the BOSS with this stuff, and will be aware of the nuances of front end and back end search and the differences between them. 

Some things I know of is that word order does count. The first word of the title is weighted more important then the last.

The other thing that counts in Control search is the content of the main comment, the body of the topic. I know you’re suggesting that it doesn’t, and hopefully we’ll get more info on that shortly. But at least in the past, the keywords of the body of the topic is used, rather then subsequent comments on the Control search. 

Hopefully we’ll get more detailed insight from Insided shortly 

@Blastoise186 , thanks for both posts!  I voted up the idea (I assumed it already did that) and I think your other post is very relevant here.

@timcavey , thanks for your reply (and that idea above)!  I am definitely learning a lot more about how the intricacies work.

I think you answered the question through your other post.  The string is NOT in the OP, but a subsequent reply.  I have no idea why it works like that….I want to search the whole darn thread.  That’s pretty rough, to be honest.  At least that answers one of my issues!

For the word order issue, I just tried again.  One of my threads has “windows proxy” in the title.  Searching for “Proxy windows” says no results.  I can see word order increasing weight, but this is giving 0 weight to any word :-) 

Our posts are full of various technical jargon, so I want to be able to search on whatever words I can recall and see what hits I get.

On the front End/customer side, this works as expected:

Thanks @mstruening !

By the way, could you fill out your profile for us as well please? It helps to make it easier for us to locate your community in case someone ever needs to check something on your end.

I can see why the differences in search can cause headaches there. I wonder if Agolia still needs to be hooked up to Control… Unfortunately for me, this is one of those times when having access to Control would have helped me out, but alas I don’t. It’s one of the (few) downsides to only having Super User rights at most.

Could you try filtering based on whether any of the words exist in any order? But other than that, I’ll have to see if I can tempt Julian to come out of the shadows. He seems to have forgotten that an old rival called Daniel has toppled him on the leaderboard for nearly a month. I’m surprised Julian hasn’t yet tried to take his crown back...

Profile all filled out, thanks for the reminder!

I’ll await Julian’s reply to see what is going on and why :-)

Appreciate your help and replies!!

Thanks all for sharing your feedback and experience here! This is valuable for us to understand your pain points and expectations better, which also helps to find the right priority to possibly improve the experience.

To be honest, I was not aware of this so far, but it seems to be the case that the Control environment is still using an older version of our search engine, not the same that we are using in the frontend.

One reason why I might not have been aware of it has to do with the way that I access content I am interested in. I usually want to check on an article, for that I go via the article overview page, which is a much more condensed list that makes it easier to navigate.

But also for general discussions, I often jump from the frontend topic directly to the page in the Control environment. Or I first filter the category that the content is living in, which also usually helps to increase the findability of content.

In your specific case, it might help already a lot to first filter for the category you know a topic lives in, and then only add one or two keywords. This might increase the amount of results, but it should be easier to pick a topic from that list rather than playing around with e.g. the order to drill down to a single topic as a result. I know this is a bit counter-intuitive, but it should be quicker this way.

Unfortunately, these search engines use many different factors and weighting to determine which content can be found. This makes it more complex and harder for me to offer general tips, especially when it is about the search in Control as I also do not know a lot about this.

I am currently working on content that explains how all of this works in a little bit more detail, however this is focussed on the frontend search. It can be expected that the search in Control will be replaced with the new search engine at some point in the future, thus is not worth investing much more time into content creation about this specifically.

Appreciate the details and your own usage, @Julian !  Your reputation is well deserved.

Based on the size and complexity of our posts, I’ll most likely have to search from the front end when in doubt.  I do my best to edit titles as they come in for better search results (for customers) though sometimes I’m looking for some much older post that I know referenced the topic, but I can only recall a few keywords that were within a reply (and we’ve only been live for 3 months….imagine a year from now).  I also tried using tags, but there’s no easy way to see all topics with a given tag on the backend.

Any remotely accurate ETA on replacing the search engine on the backend?

I unfortunately do not know exactly when we will roll this out in the Control environment as well. I will remember to update you here once I hear something.

Appreciate it, @Julian Q

If you were a betting man, would you say it’s like within 6 months, or likely longer than that?

Now that is a really tough thing to bet on. :) It is a bigger project I assume, and as I am not part of the product team it is really hard to estimate when we can prioritize this (compared to other important improvements we want to make). I don’t see this on the roadmap for the next three months at least…

Probably you have more value in @Marion Frecaut or @daniel.boon sharing their perspective on this, as they are much more into this subject than I am.

Thanks, @Julian !  I’ll await the feedback of the others :-)

Hello @mstruening, thank you very much for all this very detailed feedback. At the moment we have no short terms plan to change the search engine in Control. It's hard for me to say when we will come around to making some changes there. But you raising this makes us more aware of it. 

I will keep you informed when we plan some improvements on the search in Control :)

Appreciate the reply.  In the meantime, I CAN just go search outside of the Control panel, or use the customer view to click a tag and see all tagged items….it’s just inefficient :-)

Hopefully this gets added onto the list soon enough!