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23-Emerald IV
TomU23-Emerald IV
23-Emerald IV
August 19, 2016
Question

KB Search Highlighting

  • August 19, 2016
  • 1 reply
  • 3598 views

The knowledge base search automatically highlights words in the search results that match the search term.  This is good.  It also seems to be highlighting partial word matches.  This is not good (in my opinion).  In the example below, "do" and "working" should not be highlighted.  Neither of these are search terms.

1 reply

P
PeterCaseCommunity Manager
Community Manager
August 22, 2016

Hello Tom, thanks for calling out this problem.

As you've found, our back end search has lemmatization enabled, and so variants of the same word are returned as search hits.

"Fuzzy" search logic helps increase search effectiveness, as users don't always describe their issue or question in the same way it appears in KB articles, and we want to do what we can to bridge that gap.

The screenshot shows that our search keyword highlighting functionality is also taking the expanded list of terms, and so these are highlighed too.

For more specific keywords, for example "route" or "section", highlighting variants like routed, routes, routing; sections, sectioned, sectioning seems like a sensible thing to do. For the more ubiquitous words like "do" and "work", the benefit is not as clear-cut.

Not wanting to lose the functionality when highlighting variants of more specific terms, the only option we'd have is to introduce exact-match highlighting for a list of words we define. I don't have a cost for this, but it's not likely to be trivial to define and maintain such a list over time, and to build the logic on the search back end, and that's without considering Asian languages.

Do you (or others reading this) have other examples of how this is causing more harm than good to the user experience with the Search Results Page, so we can better evaluate whether this belongs on the roadmap ?

Many thanks.

T
23-Emerald IV
TomU23-Emerald IVAuthor
23-Emerald IV
August 22, 2016

I'm not sure it makes sense to highlight words when trying to also support plain language searching (as my example shows).  The eye is immediately drawn to the highlighted text and when the section highlighted has nothing to do with the search term, the entire result is discarded even if the result might be relevant.  Perfect example:

While this guide does indeed talk about the topic being searched for, the section that is highlighted has nothing to do with it.  Seem like it would make more sense to highlight something like this (this is straight from this guide):

I would much rather see the longer, more specific words being highlighted before simple words such as "how" and "do".

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