Search and you will find! (release notes)

Related products: CC Search

We have some good news for you! We have been working hard on improving our search algorithm, and have now implemented this in our platform, your community!





The last couple of weeks we have tested the new search algorithm with customers. The results have been very positive and show a big improvement in showing more relevant search results than previously.





The new search algorithm is now active in all of our communities. We are confident that your users will find answers to their questions a lot faster.





We now base our search results on the following rules (in order of importance):




  • Exact match on title

  • Exact match on first post

  • Exact match on all posts

  • Match with word-distance on title (means that the keywords don’t have to follow each other in the same order)

  • Match with word-distance on first post

  • Match with word-distance on all posts






We also set these additional rules:




  • Freshness is taken into account. After a year, relevancy declines with 50%.

  • Accented characters should make no difference. So even search with the wrong accents should result in a post with the good accents

  • Case insensitive

  • Typo’s are not taken into account



If you have any questions or come across results that are not satisfactory, please contact our Support desk at support@insided.com





We're looking forward to hear your experiences!
Nice job, guys! Here's my feedback.





Tops:


- It's nice to see a lot of topics from this year at the top.


- Exact match on title makes a huge difference when you know exactly what topic you're looking for.


- I'm not sure how much has changed looks-wise, but the snippets on our forum look really nice and clear and the highlighting is a nice touch.





Tips:


- Remove embedded picture code from snippets


- There's still a lot of 'stubs' (one reply topics where our superusers redirect to another topic) having a higher rank than stickies that our superusers link to frequently. That doesn't seem logical.


- Give us the option to keymatch and promote Sticky Topics and / or topics with a certain moderator tag.


- Give us the option to demote closed topics (although it's probably not recommendable).





Question: are the results in the 'related topics'-widget improved as well?
Question: are the results in the 'related topics'-widget improved as well?





No, that's not connected to each other, and is another project. For now, we will not touch that.





Thanks for the great feedback Jurgen.


We will gather all feedback the coming months, and make further improvements if needed.
Good job - it really works a lot better than before!





Normally, we see a clickrate on searchresults by 29%, but after the changes, this has increased to 45% so far and hopefully it will keep increasing :)





With a community that has 7 year old content, it is really satisfying to see more recent and relevant content on the results.





Thanks a lot.





/Nikolaj
Agreed search returns lots of results that are an exact match or close to giving customers/users a lot of choice of what to look at.





Darran
@Nikolaj, thanks for providing the metrics. Really happy to see that the investments we have made in Search are starting to pay off.





@OVOdarran, @Jurgen or any other customers, do you see similar results ?
Hi @Nikolaj,





Can you tell me how did you measure the clickrate on searchresults? This is a really good indicator 😎





Regards,


Tomas
Hi @alexisvos,


I just received this feedback from one of the Sonos superusers:





"Afraid the results are less than stellar from a quick search. Often time we tell a poster to look at their track status via a browser. I know the advice always starts with "open up a browser". When I type this in search, it gives no results.





In Google, "sonos community open up a browser" gives the desired thread in the third result.
"





If you need any further feedback from these guys, please let me know :)


Best,


Ditte
Here's another search problem from the Sonos superusers:





"As an awesome example, I know there are only a small number of topics on this site regarding IPv6 (something I keep hoping Sonos will eventually add support for), but an Insided search for IPv6 turns up 0 topics with it in the subject, and one that mentions it in a single reply. It completely misses the two topics that have it in their topic names, as shown by the Google results, and at least 8 other posts that have it mentioned in replies."


Please see the attached images :)






thanks for the input @Ditte. I added it to our Search Optimization backlog for Q3.
@Nikolaj, thanks for providing the metrics. Really happy to see that the investments we have made in Search are starting to pay off.





@OVOdarran, @Jurgen or any other customers, do you see similar results ?






@christophrooms You may find this interesting 🙂 I made a complex page flow analysis in Adobe Omniture and simplified it for you.

















- 5,1% of our visitors use forum search (last 6 months)


- 32% of visitors with a question find their answer (N=838) (September)