Search is too specific
I'm having some trouble using tender's search because of how strict it is when matching results. I'd say I'm more web-saavy than a vast majority of my users will be (well at least I hope I am) and I'm running in to a lot of searches that are returning no results, even though a manual browse turns up things that probably should have come up.
For instance, in my tender instance, I have a knowledge base article with the title:
Making a draft or archived policy active
But a search for:
make policy active
returns no results. I can understand why this might happen (you probably require all search terms to be present and you haven't gone through and added different tenses of words, because that's a lot of work), but this is very bad for my users. In this case, someone using almost the exact right keywords gets 0 results, which is very discouraging. It seems like it would be much more helpful to tend towards too many (ordered) results instead of the discouraging 0 results message.
As it stands right now, I can barely use tender search to find things that I'm looking for on the help.tenderapp.com site (which is unfortunate because there are helpful things here when I manually browse). I really like the overall feel of Tender, but this is probably the biggest issue standing in the way of usability for my case. In summary, please be less strict on searches so that users at least have something to go off.
Thanks
-Wes
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1 Posted by jbritten on 31 Dec, 2008 07:18 AM
I would like to echo this feedback. I too have found the search to be barely usable as it's simply way too strict.
2 Posted by System on 31 Dec, 2008 09:23 PM
This discussion was assigned to Kyle Neath, on ticket 113.
3 Posted by System on 31 Dec, 2008 09:24 PM
This discussion was assigned to Kyle Neath, on ticket 73.
4 Posted by System on 31 Dec, 2008 09:45 PM
This discussion was assigned to ticket 174.
Support Staff 5 Posted by Courtenay on 31 Dec, 2008 09:47 PM
Thanks for the report. We're doing a few things with search. I think the first one will be installing sphinx instead of the LIKE query we currently use. This will probably fix most of the problems, including stemming of words (make/making). We're also going to add similarity checking between issues so it will suggest similar issues while you're making one/previewing.
6 Posted by jbritten on 31 Dec, 2008 09:57 PM
Switching to sphinx sounds great. Thanks for the quick response!
7 Posted by winhamwr on 02 Jan, 2009 04:19 AM
A real search tool is best obviously, but wouldn't it be easier for usability today to just turn the like queries from an AND to an OR? If the sphinx stuff will be done tomorrow, then I guess it doesn't matter, but I'm sure you have a ton of "CRITICAL" priority stuff already :P
8 Posted by Andy Atkinson on 22 Jan, 2009 04:40 PM
+1 on this. Couldn't find support issue I'd filed already searching for any variation of my name. Fortunately had a permalink in my email because @technoweenie responded to my issue, otherwise would not have found it.
9 Posted by Tyler Bird on 23 Jan, 2009 01:05 AM
+1, looking forward to this! Thanks for all the hard work guys.
Support Staff 10 Posted by Courtenay on 26 Jan, 2009 05:03 AM
THIS IS SO CLOSE YOU CAN ALMOST TASTE IT
11 Posted by System on 28 Jan, 2009 05:11 AM
Ticket # 73 was resolved by Kyle Neath.
12 Posted by System on 28 Jan, 2009 05:15 AM
Ticket # 174 was resolved by court3nay.
13 Posted by System on 28 Jan, 2009 05:15 AM
Ticket # 113 was resolved by court3nay.
14 Posted by Kyle Neath (Git... on 28 Jan, 2009 05:16 AM
Just deployed -- we're now running a real search engine so results will be much more relevant.
Kyle Neath (GitHub Staff) closed this discussion on 28 Jan, 2009 05:16 AM.