Searching for FAQ's within a ticket or when creating a new ticket

[Emily Patrick]

Something that annoys us, and possibly others, when searching for FAQ's from within a ticket via the lightbulb icon or when going through the new item process, we find that when entering a specific number, like KB0012345 finds the article straight away, no issues, but when you don't know the unique reference number, and are searching by the name of the document, it brings up everything else, apart from what you're looking for, or what you are looking for could be on page 30.  

What is the logic behind this search feature? Is it broken? Should it not do this? Below are some examples of what I mean.  These are from within the lightbulb icon in a ticket, but the same applies on the other route too. 

 

[Steve Giller]

At first glance I would say that the all of these FAQs have either New, Student, or Staff in the descriptions.

If you search for a less common word like Distribution, or enclose the phrase in quotes I would expect you to see more desirable results.

[James Ainsworth]

Hi @Emily Patrick

The search works by looking at each individual word that you type in and it will return results that contain any of these words.  It doesn't take the entire string and look for an exact match.  The problem with only showing results that have an exact match is that users will have to know exactly what is contained in the contents of the FAQ, and any deviation from the exact string would result in it not being displayed in the results.

As suggested by Steve, removing commonly used words like "new" will help reduce the number of results.  Looking at your results you may be able to use the term "staff" to narrow these down to what you need.

 

[Emily Patrick]

@Steve Giller when searching just on terms such as distribution it gives the following: 

 

@James Ainsworth  when going with just staff it comes back with the following

All our FAQ's have the title within the main body of the FAQ too, so how would the search work? Surely, if I type in distribution, or staff, or just one key term, those items should be nearer the top of the results list? 

The first result to appear when searching staff, has the word staff half way down the article, same with the 2nd article in the list, whereas the 3rd article the word staff is nearer the top of the article. 

 

Could there be a way that almost a weighting system could be added to the search functionality, so that if you type in the whole FAQ title, it would appear at the top, and then anything else that might meet that criteria is below it, until it barely meets that criteria? 

[James Ainsworth]

@Emily Patrick

If you were to open KB0016716 does the content of the article contain the word "distribution" anywhere it in?  I'm just trying to understand if you are getting results that shouldn't be here.

[Emily Patrick]

@James Ainsworth the word Distribtion is in the article as a heading  - Distribution for notifications of amendments.  It's towards the bottom of the article.  

[HGrigsby]

Hi @Emily Patrick

I have had this exact same thing reported and demonstrated to me today.   Did you ever get an answer?

Helen 

[Emily Patrick]

Hi @HGrigsby, 

No, I didn't get a definitive answer to my query.  Now, I try and use "unique" words that I think might appear in the article, to help narrow the search results down. e.g. searching for mataro when looking for staff drive mappings, as staff/drive/mappings will return too many results to search through, where as mataro will return 3, and the 1 I want, is definately part of the results! 

We're moving away from using the inbuilt FAQ's as the usability and searchability isn't helping us.  We've mentioned it to our customer manager many times!  (She's fed up of heard about it from us I'm sure!!)