What is Knowledge actually searching

Eric_Krasner

When doing a KB search, what is being search?

• Title?
• Abstract?
• User Content?
• Analyst Content?
• Keywords?

Thanks

Adam_Dzyacky

Tom_Hendricks said:

I think the more pertinent question may be how is it searching those fields.

Good point Tom. I just opened the SP again and I'm interpreting it as weighting the rank.

(10000 * coalesce(ctTitle.RANK, 0)) + (1000 * coalesce(ctKeyword.RANK,0)) + (100 * coalesce(ctAbstract.RANK,0)) + (1 * coalesce(ctEUContent.RANK,0)) + (1 * coalesce(ctAContent.RANK,0)) as WeightedRank 

While I too invite corrections from Cireson, it certainly looks like the weight is based around where the word is found on the KA.

Adam_Dzyacky

Glancing at the stored procedure (for what I can only assume is the knowledge base search function based on its title of spGet_KnowledgeArticlesBySearchText). It looks like it is performing a search against Title, Keywords, Abstract, End User Content and Analyst Content 

Tom_Hendricks

I think the more pertinent question may be how is it searching those fields.

My users complain at a very high and steady rate from week to week that the search is not turning up articles even when they search for the exact text of an article title.  Sometimes I can repeat this, sometimes I cannot.

When searching for text that is known to be in the Keywords field, searches are significantly more successful.

What appears to be happening (I invite corrections from Cireson if I have any of this wrong) is that the search is taking each individual word in a search string and comparing the frequency that it appears in articles.  My users expect it to work like a search engine and consider phrases or proximity of words to each other, etc. instead of counting individual words and ranking based on count.

Adam_Dzyacky

Tom_Hendricks said:

I think the more pertinent question may be how is it searching those fields.

Good point Tom. I just opened the SP again and I'm interpreting it as weighting the rank.

(10000 * coalesce(ctTitle.RANK, 0)) + (1000 * coalesce(ctKeyword.RANK,0)) + (100 * coalesce(ctAbstract.RANK,0)) + (1 * coalesce(ctEUContent.RANK,0)) + (1 * coalesce(ctAContent.RANK,0)) as WeightedRank 

While I too invite corrections from Cireson, it certainly looks like the weight is based around where the word is found on the KA.

Rick_Hancks

Has there been any update on this?  I would think you would want Knowledge to search like a real search engine and not just count search terms.  Our users have a difficult time finding the articles they need.

Tom_Hendricks

I have received no update on this.  I still regularly get complaints that from people who are typing text that appears in an article, verbatim, and the article is not in the search results.  I can reproduce the issue, but I cannot solve it if I do not know what to replace.

Rick_Hancks

We have the same issue.  Sometimes the article is in the results but it is way down off the screen instead of at the top of the results.  My users will only scan the first 5-8 articles listed on the results page.  Just curious how many articles your organization has?  We have around 2000 and still have issues finding the right content.

Jonathan_Boles

Totally agreed @Tom_Hendricks and @Rick_Hancks, we've been seeing this since our first implementation of the Cireson Portal 3-4 years back. One of our environments has well over 1,000 articles and even when putting in the exact search terms, it could be past the first 20 or more.

Rick_Hancks

We did express our concerns on search to the product development over a year ago but haven't heard anything.  Maybe they could integrate Lucene or another search engine instead?

Tom_Hendricks

We have close to 4,000 articles, but that still seems like a very low number for SQL to have difficulties with. 

Our own queries and stored procedures written in-house work perfectly.  We really just want to overwrite the out-of-box SP, but realized that the one we identified for replacement was not actually getting called, and cannot find where the logic actually lives.  I am now assuming that it is embedded in a DLL somewhere.  Perhaps it is a combination of the two.

Obviously I would vastly prefer Cireson to fix this, for so many different reasons, but my users' patience wears thin and I am well past tired of deflecting.  It just needs to work.

I do see that the Knowledge Base is in the SMP roadmap, and I remain hopeful that this is a significant part of that effort.  It really needs to be.  Addressing this will go a long way toward restoring faith in the KB.