Search results help?

This forum is for all Flare related Tips and Tricks.
Have a tip or trick you use while working in Flare? Share it here.
Post Reply
ghillerson
Propeller Head
Posts: 85
Joined: Wed Mar 05, 2014 10:22 pm
Location: Near Santa Cruz, CA
Contact:

Search results help?

Post by ghillerson »

I've got a large HTML-5 project (doc.splicemachine.com) that includes an SQL Reference Manual.

SQL includes a "WITH" clause.

When users search for "WITH", they get no results. When they search for "WITH CLAUSE", it shows up, but way down the list. I have WITH and WITH clause as index keywords on its page. And I have the "Enable partial word search" with min size set to 4 in my target.

Is there any way to coerce flare into putting WITH at/near the top of the search results?

Thanks in advance,
Gary
Psider
Propellus Maximus
Posts: 811
Joined: Wed Jul 06, 2011 1:32 am

Re: Search results help?

Post by Psider »

ghillerson
Propeller Head
Posts: 85
Joined: Wed Mar 05, 2014 10:22 pm
Location: Near Santa Cruz, CA
Contact:

Re: Search results help?

Post by ghillerson »

Thank you! I didn't know about the stop words.
ghillerson
Propeller Head
Posts: 85
Joined: Wed Mar 05, 2014 10:22 pm
Location: Near Santa Cruz, CA
Contact:

Re: Search results help?

Post by ghillerson »

Sigh. Turns out that it doesn't work for HTML5 output.

I went through the excellent instructions for changing my 'stop words', built my project, and tested. I went back to the instructions to see what I did wrong, and there, at the very bottom of the instructions page, was a note saying that you cannot change Stop Words for HTML5 output.

I learned something, which is nice. And I sure wish that MadCap had put that note at the top of the page.

Thanks for the tip.
Psider
Propellus Maximus
Posts: 811
Joined: Wed Jul 06, 2011 1:32 am

Re: Search results help?

Post by Psider »

Ah, sorry. I didn't read the topic in detail. :(
roboHAL
Sr. Propeller Head
Posts: 254
Joined: Mon Dec 31, 2012 9:57 am

Re: Search results help?

Post by roboHAL »

Hello ghillerson.

Have a look at this topic viewtopic.php?f=13&t=27546where I posted some suggestions for the kind of issue you are facing.

So enter:
<div class="hidden">WITH</div
a bunch of times

Hope that helps. :)
ghillerson
Propeller Head
Posts: 85
Joined: Wed Mar 05, 2014 10:22 pm
Location: Near Santa Cruz, CA
Contact:

Re: Search results help?

Post by ghillerson »

If only that worked for my situation ... I see its value for synonyms, but in my case, the word "WITH" already appears throughout the document. Flare ignores it because it is a stop-word in their search algorithm, whether hidden or not. Unfortunately, for HTML-5 outputs, there's apparently no way to change the stop words (as stated in the Flare manuals).
roboHAL
Sr. Propeller Head
Posts: 254
Joined: Mon Dec 31, 2012 9:57 am

Re: Search results help?

Post by roboHAL »

I didn't glean that dilemma initially. In that event, there may be no other alternative than to provide search instructions to the end-user that articulates the fact that searching for "WITH" should be avoided in favor of some other word(s) that you introduce to steer the user to the appropriate topic.
GregStenhouse
Sr. Propeller Head
Posts: 330
Joined: Tue May 13, 2008 3:27 pm
Location: Christchurch, New Zealand

Re: Search results help?

Post by GregStenhouse »

Interestingly it appears Flare only uses the lower case form of stop words in HTML5, entering "With" or "WITH" etc will still search for those terms.

As a slightly out there idea you could write a script that forces text entered into the search box to be upper case. Or takes the text on submit, checks if there is "with" in there, and makes just the WITH upper case before submitting the search query.
ghillerson
Propeller Head
Posts: 85
Joined: Wed Mar 05, 2014 10:22 pm
Location: Near Santa Cruz, CA
Contact:

Re: Search results help?

Post by ghillerson »

If I search for "WITH" it does work, but my SQL "WITH" statement topic shows up below about 20 other topics. That was the original issue - a customer support person complained about the low ranking of WITH in the searches. I've advised searching for "with clause" which does produce the results we want, but customers will not know to do that. Sigh.

Thanks for your suggestion.

g
roboHAL
Sr. Propeller Head
Posts: 254
Joined: Mon Dec 31, 2012 9:57 am

Re: Search results help?

Post by roboHAL »

If practical, promoting the word itself will help with the ranking. For instance, can you add WITH to the title tag and/or make it a heading 1 throughout?
ghillerson
Propeller Head
Posts: 85
Joined: Wed Mar 05, 2014 10:22 pm
Location: Near Santa Cruz, CA
Contact:

Re: Search results help?

Post by ghillerson »

It's too much to expect users to type in upper case and I have too much else to do, so I'm just going to pass on this. The obvious correct solution is for Flare to figure out how to allow modifications to the stop-words list for HTML outputs.

Thanks again for suggestions.

- gary
JRtechw
Propeller Head
Posts: 68
Joined: Thu Oct 05, 2017 8:08 pm

Re: Search results help?

Post by JRtechw »

Has the r3 update introduced stop word manipulation for HTML5 outputs at all? It seems ludicrous that Flare includes three of the five Ws in their stop list (when, where, who), but has NOT included 'how', 'why', or 'what', and there's no way to change this for its much-promoted HTML5 output.

Users are so used to Google search now that half our OLH queries are natural language queries. If you can't modify the stop word list for HTML5, you have no choice but to carefully edit each topic's search metadata to remove common natural language query terms to eliminate junk responses. This is an unsustainable solution.

Flare either has to bring the search engine for HTML5 up to a standard modern users are now used to, or make it easier to integrate a third party solution.
kodster28
Jr. Propeller Head
Posts: 3
Joined: Wed Mar 04, 2020 4:19 pm

Re: Search results help?

Post by kodster28 »

Howdy all,

I posted about modifying Flare's stopwords on another thread (viewtopic.php?f=12&t=31921).

If you wanted, you could probably modify my Python script to remove the 'with' entry from the list of stopwords.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1HDYiNJ ... sp=sharing
Post Reply