KB SEARCH OPTIMIZATION

[Ash_cara]

Hello everybody,

I am writing KB articles. What I need to find out now, ways (tricks, tips and techniques) of optimizing the KB search, so that when a user searches the KB, the most relevant articles will display.

At the moment, I have inserted in each article a KEY WORDS field.

Would that be sufficient? Is there anything else that I could or should be doing?

Please, if anybody has experience in KB searches, get in touch and share with me ways of doing it.


Thanks

Elly

[LTinker68]

If you have several products or "areas" of your help then you could add search filtering, too. MadCap uses that on their KB (http://kb.madcapsoftware.com).

And welcome to the forums.

[NorthEast]

Other things that may be worth looking at are synonyms and search filters.

Synonyms are alternative words that the user might search for, e.g. you could have a group synonym 'URL=link=address', meaning a search for any one of those terms will also show topics that contain the other terms.

If you have a large knowledgebase, search filters may be useful to filter your search results. You can see an example in the MadCap knowledgebase, where you can filter by product.

[KevinDAmery]

As Dave suggests, Synonyms would be a great idea, because the word you use may not be the one your users think of first. For example, suppose you use the word "image" throughout your documents, but your user instead is searching for "picture". If you don't include "picture" as a synonym for "image" anyone who searches for "picture" won't get any hits (and will probably get angry about it....)

[Ash_cara]

Hi guys,

Thanks a lot for your suggestions. However, I would like to ask you - if you can to go more into detail or point me to comprehensive documentation.
I had thought about dividing into the different products and that is easy enough.
What I dont understand is:

1) How do I add search filters so that the user will be able to search amongst the articles of one specific product?

2) Where would I insert the group synonim? In the key word section, in a separate section?

I really need to learn from the start.

Thanks again for your help.

Elly

[NorthEast]

Rather than go through it all here, I would have a look in Flare's help.

Synonyms
- Creating Synonyms to Enhance Search Results

Search filters
- Inserting Concept Keywords into Topics (for how to insert a concept term)
- Adding Search Filter Sets to Projects
- Creating Search Filters (for linking your filters to your concept terms)

[Ash_cara]

Dave,

Thanks for your reply. Now at least I know where to look in.

Elly