Promoting FAQs in search

[Gareth Cantrell]

How can we promote an FAQ in the portal search widget?

We have a new FAQ which mentions the word "password" more than any other FAQ, however when searching for this term, the relevant FAQ is not even displayed in the initial results.

To find the correct article, we need to switch from "All" to "FAQ" in the search and then click "More Results..." to eventually find the relevant FAQ right at the end of the list.

Even if we search for "Change Password" which appears in the title of the FAQ, it still doesn't bring it even remotely near the top of the results.

[Damien Lynn]

I'd also be very interested to know how this works and if there is anything we can do to bump things up to the top of results as we also have the same issue.

[Steve Giller]

Hi @Gareth Cantrell

Can I just confirm that you're searching on the Employee Portal widget, and the issue is that the results aren't sorted in the way you'd expect?

FAQs are ordered by feedback count - so "promoting" them would currently be by ensuring they have more feedback.

[Gareth Cantrell]

Hi @Steve Giller

Hopefully the below screenshots illustrate the issue:

I searched for the exact title of the FAQ (obviously, users will probably only search "change password", however the result is the same).

In the first image, under the "All" tab, the relevant FAQ is not shown in the grouped list.

I have to click on "More results..." which then takes me to the FAQ tab.

After clicking "More results..." a few more times, and scrolling right to the bottom of the FAQ tab, I finally find the article I'm looking for.

[Steve Giller]

The length of the search term is not having the effect you intend - I've checked internally and this is an "or" search, so you'd probably get better results with "Change Password"
Some words are ignored (typically words with fewer than 3 letters) but from the screenshots it looks like "How" is hurting you here.

[Gareth Cantrell]

@Steve Giller even with only "change password" the effect is the same.

Initial results are identical to the 1st image in my previous reply.

Click on "More results..." this time results in the following:

[Steve Giller]

19 minutes ago, Gareth Cantrell said:

Initial results are identical to the 1st image in my previous reply.

Unfortunately they will be - as mentioned they're sorted by feedback so that will not have changed, however you have halved the result count.
The only way to "force" this currently is to ensure the ones you want near the top of the search have the most feedback.

[Gareth Cantrell]

@Steve Giller could we request an enhancement to manually promote an article.

A new FAQ sitting so far down the list will never get seen enough to get feedback on it, and as far as I can tell, we cannot artificially create loads of feedback on a new FAQ item to promote it.

[Emily Patrick]

+1 on the ability to promote FAQ's as this is something we have struggled with for a long time.  My way around is to only search for 1 word, I still get pages of results, but I hope it might reveal itself higher up the list, and try and think of a unique word that's likely to be in the article I'm looking for.  

 

@Steve Giller, I've done a quick test on what you have said about the feedback returning the result higher than other articles just now on the word software.  I have 1 article with 2 likes, and another with 1 like (small numbers I know, but it's the same across both articles hence the choosing) but in the results, neither of them appear in the top results.  To get the one with 2 likes, I have to go to the very last page, and it's the last result to appear! 

[CraigP]

15 hours ago, Gareth Cantrell said:

@Steve Giller could we request an enhancement to manually promote an article.

A new FAQ sitting so far down the list will never get seen enough to get feedback on it, and as far as I can tell, we cannot artificially create loads of feedback on a new FAQ item to promote it.

This. Weighting results based on feedback makes very little sense to me personally. Surely ones with less feedback are then less likely to be seen and consequently receive less feedback, perpetuating the problem. Also, at least on our instance, not that many people go out of their way to provide feedback on FAQs anyway.

I can see the ability to manually promote a specific FAQ when there is a particular related issue happening being useful, but the idea of having to go through and arbitrarily decide each one's importance in comparison to each other still doesn't sound ideal when we have so many.

Can there not be a search result weighting system looking for the closest match to the search text in the title and/or the number of times the search text appears in the FAQ itself?

[Steve Giller]

For Enhancements, the process is now detailed on the Docs site.

[Emily Patrick]

Thanks @Steve Giller, so can you mark this topic as an enhancement then please? Having read the article and at this point (https://docs.hornbill.com/esp-fundamentals/about/about-roadmap#how-we-manage-feature-requests-received-from-customers-or-partners) where it says to raise it on the forum, which it has been here since mid June. I'm sure @CraigP, @Gareth Cantrell and @Damien Lynn would be interested in getting it marked as an enhancement too?