Search results ranking order in WebHelp Plus is not good

[kSlkj39j]

Hi All,

We're having real trouble with the ranking of our search results.

We have 830 topics in WebHelp Plus output. We are testing examples given to us by our customers and other internal users. In these cases, we know which topic they should be finding.

For example, we have a topic with an H1 heading, "Deleting tags globally". When we search for that exact phrase, the topic appears at #76 in the results list. When we put the term in quotes, it is the only search result.

Interestingly, when we generate WehHelp output, it comes up first, even without quotes. We have a lot of examples like this.

We really want to use WebHelp Plus, as we have 300 PDF docs that we need to include in the output, and we'd like them to be full-text searchable. My understading is that WebHelp uses Madcap's internal search algorithm, while WebHelp Plus uses results from the Microsoft Indexing Service. Unfortunately, there does not appear to be much information available on how to manage relevancy withing the Indexing Service.

The results we get from WebHelp are fine; they just don't include PDFs. At this point, there is talk of creating HTML topics that include keywords for each PDF, with links to the PDFs, to make them searchable in a WebHelp output. This is obviously a lot of work for 300 docs, it can never be as comprehensive as a full-text indexing, and it's the kind of thing that a search engine should do for you anyway. It feels like we're going backwards, not forwards, in terms of efficiency.

Has anyone else had a similar experience with search results?

[phanna]

Hi there,
Did you ever get a response to your question? I'm experiencing something similar and am looking for help.

Cheers,
P

[Richard Ferrell]

Please see the following KB article on how Search Works in the Various outputs.

http://kb.madcapsoftware.com/default_csh.htm#OUTA1008F