Problems with Search

[yserota]

We have had several complaints from users on the HTML5 Search functionality. I'm going to give a single example and I hope some Experienced Propeller Heads can give me some assistance. If for example, we search for the 2.0, the result set does not find the topic containing the following: ftp://agm_read@ftpast.saas.hp.com/users ... orAgM_2.00. Any known restraints?

[atomdocs]

I don't think the HTML5 output can handle partial matches or wildcard searches. If there are common patterns that your users need to find, perhaps you can set up index entries?

[docudramaqueen]

There are any number of problems with the html 5 search behavior with Flare 9. Don't know yet if they've been addressed with 10. Quotation marks (a standard functionality in most search engines), does not yield desired results. Flare actually searches for the text string with the quotation marks, so "this-word" actually looks for "this-word", not this-word. Wildcards do not appear to work, and apparently modifiers like "and", "or", and "not" do not work effectively either. All of them are included on the Stop-word list, so "copy and paste" should ignore the word "and" and treat it as an operator, ie., just the same as if you'd typed "copy + paste", but I've found search results that identify and highlight every occurrence of "and", which is a royal pain.

And speaking of highlighting, we found that the output will randomly delete chunks of text in a help topic when you toggle off highlights. It was so bad, we had to disable the toggle feature so our CSR's wouldn't accidentally lose content without realizing it...

I highly recommend turning off the partial word search as well. It doesn't just work from the perspective of typing something like "all" and having it find "allow", "allocate", etc. If you type "allow", search will return "a", "all", "low", "ow", and "allow". Plus, enabling partial word search will increase your build time by a magnitude of about 10.

[Psider]

Regarding the deleting words, it appears to happen if the same word is in your search string twice.

e.g. if I search for 'create order order details button', then turn off highlighting, 'order' will vanish with the highlighting. If I search for 'create order details button', then the highlighting turns off without hiding 'order'.

I'm about to lodge a bug report with Madcap, including a valid scenario why people would include the same word twice - apart from 'we can't control what users enter in their search' . (Plus try to extract information about phrase/wildcard searching at the same time. )