micro content very disappointing

[feitelberg]

I'm hoping that there's an answer for my issue, but I don't see one at the moment.

The problem is the way Flare treats the micro content phrase. It appears to be stemming when it shouldn't. If I have micro content with the word access in it, I get the snippet whenever I search for accessibility which has nothing to do with access to a product.

Showing the snippet in the search results for accessibility is wrong so I had to take that word out of my phrase even though I really don't want to.

What's needed here is some semantic understanding of the meaning of these words. Access to something and accessibility have nothing to do with each other.

And given the potential for showing the wrong information with this feature, I can't use micro content at all unless something can fix this or give me answer on how to get around this issue.

Any thoughts?

[BedfordWriter]

Similar thoughts, but I'm not sure whether to count that as a feature or bug. None of us can predict what words a customer will use when searching for something, and it's extremely likely that they will use a similar word rather than the specific one you put in the phrase.

My work-around is to cover the bases by ensuring there's a match for any word in a phrase that, by itself, differs from the meaning of the phrase as a whole. So, one phrase might be "how do I count ducks", but I'll have another for "who is the Count".

[feitelberg]

I agree with you; there's no way to know what the user will search for. But I have more information on this:

It seems that the problem is with one word searches. When I use a single word phrase, I can get matches against words in multi-word phrases.

And the match doesn't need to exact because it appears to auto stem so accessibility matches access and decorate matches decorative.

This leads to very bad results.

I can see that Madcap was thinking the auto stemming was a feature but I think it's a bug. More importantly, there's no way to turn off the stemming which
would probably help a lot. Plan to report this as a bug.

[doc_guy]

Seems like stemming should be an option in the target editor. In context of my work environment, I think stemming on one word searches would be helpful to my users, but I can see how it is not in yours.

They did say at MadWorld that this is just the beginning with micro content, and we can expect enhancements to come. So if you have an enhancement/bug request, be sure to get it in ASAP, because it sounds to me (looking in from the outside, of course) that this is a feature they are still actively developing.

[kmorrison]

I'll just chime in and say I had a similar issue with "past" and "paste" and it is now officially bug #145814.
I've turned off micro-content until this is fixed, since our subject matter includes a lot of terms that begin with the same letters but aren't even close to equivalent.

That said, I'm excited about the prospect of this feature becoming usable. It's a cool feature. Keep polishing it, MadCap!

[feitelberg]

Wow! past vs paste. That's nasty. Thanks for sharing.

My team has concluded this is not ready for use yet. If more features are coming that's great but for now we will not use this.

I plan to make a request to control stemming. That's absolutely needed to get better results.

[MiroslavVeljanoski]

I'll just chime in and say I had a similar issue with "past" and "paste" and it is now officially bug #145814.
I've turned off micro-content until this is fixed, since our subject matter includes a lot of terms that begin with the same letters but aren't even close to equivalent.

That said, I'm excited about the prospect of this feature becoming usable. It's a cool feature. Keep polishing it, MadCap!

It's been a while since the last comment on this, but is there anything new from MadCap regarding this bug? In our team, we are facing the same problem with micro-content and wondering if MadCap or someone else came up with a solution.

[Fiona]

I'm also looking for a reply as to whether there has been any progress – microcontent could be invaluable, but is unusable for us in its current state.

[doc_guy]

Make sure you are hitting up the MadCap bug report form with these issues. Every one of you with this issue need to submit a bug report detailing you use case and exactly what isn't working correctly, with examples. Squeaky wheels get grease.