Search Service Catalog - enhance word search hits

fe_fe

Hi all,
I'm trying out the Comunity SSP from Cireson, with the intent on going into production and probably buy the licensed Portal & Aadvanced Service Offerings later on if we like it. However, I'm pretty unhappy with the ability to search for service offerings in the service catalog. 

I think Offering Search engine seems to need a little tweaking. 
When I search for an offering in the Service Catalog, it only shows up if you type the FULL word from the offering title.
Let me give you an example:

Let's say that I have 3 offerings:

1. ‘I need access to the computer’
2. ‘I have issues with a computer’
3. ‘I want to access the computersystem’

(Notice that there is no space between computer and system in offering #3.)

What I’m trying to achieve is that, when I in the Cireson Portal search in the Service Catalog offerings, and type in the word ‘computer’ it shows all the 3 offerings.
At the moment, what I experience is that it only shows me offering #1 and #2..
Is there any way to enable search hits on part of the word?

Jonathan_Boles

Hi @fe_fe, unfortunately partial word searching is not yet available within the portal, however, there is a bit of a workaround that I posted here.

I would also suggest upvoting the feature request posted by @S_Terry here. Sadly the feature request hasn't gotten many upvotes to date so perhaps this thread will reignite folks to take a look and continue upvoting so it gets the attention of the Cireson Dev team.

Jonathan_Boles

@Tom_Hendricks, I couldn't agree more. An effective search solution I believe is critical for the users to be able to truly utilize the system to it's full potential. Being able to adjust and optimize how the search algorithm is applied would be most help - even knowing it's exact configuration as it stands today for each search type would be helpful. @Seth_Coussens, is this something that might be able to be provided? Perhaps it's in a support article and I'm just missing over it.

Jonathan_Boles

Hi @fe_fe, unfortunately partial word searching is not yet available within the portal, however, there is a bit of a workaround that I posted here.

I would also suggest upvoting the feature request posted by @S_Terry here. Sadly the feature request hasn't gotten many upvotes to date so perhaps this thread will reignite folks to take a look and continue upvoting so it gets the attention of the Cireson Dev team.

Tom_Hendricks

Thanks for mentioning the feature request,@Jonathan_Boles.  I missed it somehow, but it's a good one.  Upvoted!

fe_fe

@Jonathan_Boles @Tom_Hendricks
Thanks for the answer!
Damn it, it's a pain in the ass when you're dealing with a non english language which has LOTS and lots of words that consist of multiple words pulled together. :-(
The search offering function is pretty useless for me.

Tom_Hendricks

@fe_fe, English makes a great test environment for a search algorithm

I think it is worth noting that this is not just confined to request offerings.  My users are complaining about the Related Articles search as well, which targets the Articles web service.  As an example, you can type the exact title of a KB article in as your work item Title, and that article may not even make the top 10 in the search results, while the other articles at the top have nothing to do with what is written in the Title and Description.

Someone can correct me if I am wrong, but I think this is because the search functions count the number of times that individual words appear in the articles or offerings, rather than how closely the phrases match, etc.  Hopefully if it gets fixed here, it can get fixed everywhere else.

Jonathan_Boles

@Tom_Hendricks, I couldn't agree more. An effective search solution I believe is critical for the users to be able to truly utilize the system to it's full potential. Being able to adjust and optimize how the search algorithm is applied would be most help - even knowing it's exact configuration as it stands today for each search type would be helpful. @Seth_Coussens, is this something that might be able to be provided? Perhaps it's in a support article and I'm just missing over it.

Damien_Cresswell

I think that we could benefit from the ability to search by phrases in the sense that - if i search for "computer is broken" then it should search for each individual word as a keyword instead of the whole sentence in that specific order. it should be able to identify the words and seperate them into keywords

fe_fe

Damien_Cresswell said:

I think that we could benefit from the ability to search by phrases in the sense that - if i search for "computer is broken" then it should search for each individual word as a keyword instead of the whole sentence in that specific order. it should be able to identify the words and seperate them into keywords

Agreed.
Go upvote:
https://community.cireson.com/discussion/comment/2451#Comment_2451

Ben_McGarry

Upvote !

Our users expect to be able to use partial words in searches.  Our Search isn't working at all at present but that is another story.