Optimizing Search in HTML outputs

[Daniel Ferguson]

Earlier today, I presented a MadCap webinar on enhancing the search experience for users of the HTML outputs that Flare users produce. Flare offers a lot of options to design better search experiences for users of our help systems, but search is also an inexact science with a lot of moving parts. I'm starting this thread so that we can discuss and share ideas about optimal search design. Please share what you've done (or haven't done), what you feel like has worked, ask questions, and make feature suggestions!

Let's harness our collective experience!

[atomdocs]

Hi Daniel, thanks for starting this topic. Your presentation was excellent. I encourage anyone who outputs to HTML to download the webinar. From the presentation I learned that there is so much more that we can do to optimize search in our projects. In the past I just let search do its default thing. Not any more.

It was good to see how Flare assists with this task, such as using the File List view to configure topic titles and descriptions.

I was interested in your comment that file names with words separated with hyphens are more effective, in that hyphens allow search engines to identify individual words. I'll start doing that from now.

I will also start using synonyms, thanks for explaining that concept.

[lise]

Hi Daniel,

Thank you so much for yesterday's webinar. I'm in the middle of re-thinking my entire project (first time working in Flare) and everything you said was very useful.

In my re-organization I have been thinking of having one longer topic page with drop-downs for what used to be smaller procedural topics. I like the idea of having all the information in one page without having to navigate away from it (especially on phones and tablets).

I used to have a topic for each of the following: Pages, Create Pages, Duplicate Pages, Schedule Pages, etc. and now I'm playing around with the idea of having one topic called Pages that includes drop-downs to each of those other related topics. However I'm not sure how to make that work with what you were saying in the webinar about Search. Search looks at headings for the most part, as I learned in your webinar, but in my example the only H1 would be "Pages". 'Create Pages' would not get a mention really because it is only a drop-down within that page.

Is there any way to force the drop-down titles to be searchable?
Also, if a user searches for "Create Pages" which is a drop-down title in the 'Pages' topic, is it possible to have the user land on the 'Create Pages' drop-down immediately and have it auto-expand?

[whunter]

The webinar inspired me to re-evaluate using h2s to improve search results, but I quickly ran into the same issue that lise mentions in the previous post.

If I use longer topics with h2 subheadings, then I want to either:
* Make the h2s into drop-down sections, or
* Have an auto-generated "in this topic" link section so people can quickly scan what's in the topic and jump there - like the mini-TOC but for content in the current topic, not under it

To my knowledge, neither option is possible in Flare currently.

Alternatively it would be nice if Flare allowed me to say "treat this style as if it were an h2" or some other way to elevate the style in importance for search.

[wclass]

Thanks for the webinar Daniel, I learnt lots of new things.
We are already working on our heading 1s, and are considering updating the descriptions (but the job looks quite big at the moment).
What we'd like to do is investigate more about concept links and search filters, and we need to test performance for partial word search, etc.

thanks again.

[NorthEast]

If I use longer topics with h2 subheadings, then I want to either:
* Make the h2s into drop-down sections, or
* Have an auto-generated "in this topic" link section so people can quickly scan what's in the topic and jump there - like the mini-TOC but for content in the current topic, not under it

To my knowledge, neither option is possible in Flare currently.

Regarding the drop down sections, you could just set it up as a toggler - so the h2 heading is the toggler hotspot for the section underneath.

[lise]

Regarding the drop down sections, you could just set it up as a toggler - so the h2 heading is the toggler hotspot for the section underneath.

Dave, I fooled around with togglers for the first time last week to do precisely that. It seems to work ok but it is more complicated and time consuming to set up, having to give what is toggled a name then associating that name with the toggler's title (and having to wrap the toggle with div tags for more elaborate combinations like paragraphs, lists, images, and a combination of the like). It certainly isn't as simple or as elegant as a drop-down, that's for sure. I wonder why togglers can be assigned a heading but not drop-downs.

When a toggle title is assigned a heading, does a search for that heading bring the user directly to the toggle title within a topic, and if so, does it auto-expand? I'll give it a try next week, but I thought I would ask in the meantime just in case you know for a fact that it does not.

[NorthEast]

Yeah, setting up togglers will be more time-consuming, it was just to say that it is possible to have your h2 headings expand the section content.

When a toggle title is assigned a heading, does a search for that heading bring the user directly to the toggle title within a topic, and if so, does it auto-expand? I'll give it a try next week, but I thought I would ask in the meantime just in case you know for a fact that it does not.

The search will highlight all instances of the term(s) in the topic, and will expand any dropdown/toggler sections that contain the term.
So if your search term was only used in the toggler heading and not its content, then no it won't expand the toggler; the term would need to be in the content.

In HTML5 outputs, a search doesn't bring (scroll) you to the position in the topic.

[lise]

In HTML5 outputs, a search doesn't bring (scroll) you to the position in the topic.

Thanks Dave. That's a shame. I guess I will go ahead with plan B then and create most of my topics as snippets so that they can appear under their own h1 or h2 heading in a topic and then again as a drop-down on the main page. I was really hoping to avoid that.

[Spectre]

Daniel,

Thanks for the webinar. Very useful.

When performing searches of my content, I've realised that the breadcrumbs proxy is being included in the search. So if I search on "querying" (not necessarily a brilliant search term I agree) I get all the topics where the breadcrumbs path includes the word querying, as well as the actual topic I want, which might be Querying the database . I've looked for a way to exclude the breadcrumbs proxy from the search but I don't see it. Can it be done?

Thanks.

**UPDATE** The answer from Madcap is that the search term will be highlighted in the breadcrumbs text, but is not part of the search criteria. In other words, a topic is not returned BECAUSE the search term is part of the breadcrumbs, and this is what I wanted to confirm.

[seo2014]

Hi Daniel,

Is there any way I can see or download the webinar. I just joined, so missed it.
I'm trying to change the search results of my docs and would like to tweak the default search listing while someone's searching for a keyword.
Please let me know.

[NorthEast]

See: http://www.madcapsoftware.com/resources ... inars.aspx