We recently discovered that a significant portion of our help center articles (housed in Zendesk) are not appearing in Gainsight federated search results, even when a user searches a direct keyword included in a live article. After connecting with the Gainsight support team, we have been told that this is due to a technical limitation with the Gainsight integration with Zendesk Knowledge only crawling up to 5,000 characters of plain text. This means when a user performs a search using a keyword that appears after 5k characters, the article will not appear in Gainsight federated search results at all (versus appearing with a lower rank). This limitation also extends to our Community platform (housed directly in Gainsight) which contradicts the information we received that the 5k character limitation is due to the integration. Regardless, our community and help center represent a significant volume of scaled support resources for our users that are not being surfaced.
Accurate search results are a critical function of our scaled support ecosystem. To put this into perspective, the majority of our help center technical documentation (likely around 70% of 250 articles) have more than 5000 characters after html is stripped. It is not feasible for us to restructure our content strategy to exclusively contain short articles. This limitation increases the likelihood users do not find available answers which negatively impacts our user experience. It decreases the trust in our scaled support and undermines our efforts to enable users with more efficient self-serve options.
Where we do not expect Gainsight to compare with search giants like Google (that crawl over 15 million characters of plain text per page), expecting a higher character limit than 5,000 is reasonable. Please consider prioritizing an update that enables more characters to be crawled.
