About help center end user search



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Jennifer Rowe

Zendesk Documentation Team

Edited Jun 21, 2024


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56 comments

Is there a way to disable or reduce fuzzy search? We have clients complaining that they struggle to figure out which articles are helpful to them because the search results return so many possible matches, and they feel overwhelmed. 

A good example is that I just searched for "gender" and had 34 possible matches returned. Only 2 of our articles actually contain the word gender - the rest were all matching on terms like "general", "generally" and "generated". 

I understand the intent of fuzzy search and can see how it's picked up those terms, but for our users, it's creating noise more than being helpful. 

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Is there a way to disable or reduce fuzzy search?

We have the same issue here as well as an related issue.

If our customers search for the word "workflow" we get maybe 10 results while if they search for "workflow group" you would expect them to get fewer results where all must contain both words but instead we get 28 results where the articles contain just one of the words. So the search do not work with an implicit AND operator between the search words but instead use implicit OR.

Effectively, this yields our documentation kinda useless and we're currently looking for alternatives to Zendesk Guide.

Please advice.

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How far does stemming go? Is it pretty much limited to standard prefixes/suffixes (de-, re-, un-, -ing, -ed) or will things like info/information and config/configuration match?

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Was there a recent update to this (like today?), search results are pulling in articles without the keyword and seem to have flipped the sort order we were seeing yesterday and it's causing some mayhem. How can we fix this? 

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We are also seeing this drastic shift in how search results are being sorted. This appears to have started today for us as well. Our teams are reporting articles that are normally at the top of search results being buried into page two or three of the results rather than the top few choices. The search tool seems to be pulling in articles that are not associated with (or very loosely associated with) the search terms being entered by our team members. It is as though the search tool is ignoring tags and article titles when sorting results. It is causing a lot of inconvenience for our team and our regular use of our Knowledge Base. Was there any recent changes (starting today/last night) and is there anything that can be done to resolve this issue?

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Yes, we're also seeing this issue today, which renders the search effectively useless. A search for 'Teams' returns our article titled 'Teams' (and which contains the term team or teams forty-three times) on the second page 🙈

Edit: I've contacted Zendesk support directly and they've confirmed this is related to a known incident their devs are working on.

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Nicolas P.

Zendesk Customer Care

Hey Patrick Morgan! Sorry for the late reply to your message.
I got in touch with our content team about your comment. They confirmed that it was a mistake and they deleted the phrase.
Thank you for pointing that out!

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Hello,

Is there a way to turn off the Article Voting?

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Amy Gracer

Community Moderator

Hannah Lucid

You can hide the voting feature on the articles page. 

Comment out this section

{{!-- {{#with article}}
          <div class="article-votes">
            <span class="article-votes-question" id="article-votes-label">{{t 'was_this_article_helpful'}}</span>
             
            <div class="article-votes-controls" role="group" aria-labelledby="article-votes-label" style="float:none">
             
             
                {{vote 'up' role='radio' class='button article-vote article-vote-up' selected_class="button-primary"}}
                {{vote 'down' role='radio' class='button article-vote article-vote-down' selected_class="button-primary"}}
             
            </div>
            
            <div class="article-votes-controls"><small class="article-votes-count">
              {{vote 'label' class='article-vote-label'}}</small>
            </div>
          </div>
        {{/with}}--}}

 

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Hi! 

This is so hard to find (and I saw the documentation) the right way to write the url to get via API results for a certain query ! 

You write: "The only mandatory parameter is filter[locales]. Other parameters can be added to narrow down the search result set." but theres 0 example :/

+ the flow builder api call maker doesn't accept "[":

 

 

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Hi Jennifer! Thanks for sharing this info, it's very useful! We'd like to know a bit more about the Fuzzy search though. We've tested it on our English Help Centre, and it doesn't seem to work. E.g. If we search for “camcellation” in our external Help Centre, we get no results (0 articles), even though, the system should actually search for "cancellation" and get some related results. Do you know if this feature is actually working? If so, for what languages? Is there a way to activate it? Thanks!

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I also wish the Help Center search was a lot more like Google.

Why would an article with "topic planner" in the title not show up when I search "topic planner"?

It does on the second click of the search with no change to the text.

 

I'm often demonstrating to end users how to find our resources and then look foolish when it doesn't show up. I now say to them not to search for too long, just reach to us and out ask. This costs us the extra capacity required to support them as well as harming our reputation. We provide a user-friendly interface in our own software which is let down by poor search functionality when looking for our knowledge base articles.

Do you have any plans to improve the Help Center search? And if not, can I implore you to reconsider?

Thanks

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Nicole Saunders

Zendesk Community Manager

Hi everyone - 

Just a reminder that product managers do not typically see product feedback posted in the comments on knowledge base articles. If you'd like your product feedback and feature requests to get noted and responded to by the product teams, please post it in the Guide Feedback Topic in the community. This is the official intake for customer feedback, and where PMs will typically respond and engage. Thanks!

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I want to look for articles that contains a specific phrase, not any of the words within that phrase. For example, we are changing our corporate domain so I need to find any article with the old domain. But since our company name is in the domain, any article that has our company name in it shows up in the search results. 

Based on what I'm reading here, am I right in understanding that because of fuzzy logic, if I search "companyname.com" I will get results for articles that don't contain that specific phrase? 

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Hi Zendesk team,

In your relevance scores: does Section title refer to the ZD structure of Category > Section > Article?

OR 

does it refer to a heading within an article?

Google appears to pick up headings to display them in search results, which is helpful. I'd like to know if I need to spend more time working on ZD section titles, or on article headings?

Can you clarify please?

https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408894061338-About-Help-Center-end-user-search#h_88432433111547663753531

Cheers

E.A. Brown

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Hello! 

I was wondering if anyone could provide me with information on how to proactively affect the search results given a specific type of input. 

Context: 

Looking at the "Searches with no results (Top 5)" section of the a Help Center dashboard, I noticed that there a number of people who are entering their order numbers into the search field. 

Often this is an attempt at finding tracking info about their order. 

If there were any way to provide, say, articles with a certain label (probably "tracking" in this case) or treat number entries as searched for "Tracking" or "Where is my order" if someone types in a number into the search field that would be great. 

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Hi, the zendesk search is very bad. For example, when I search the term "Bill" in the help center search bar, the suggested search populates relevant articles when I am typing, but then once I press enter, the actual search yields very irrelevant results, most of which do not even have the term "Bill" in the title.

What gives? This has happened repeatedly to several people, and I can only assume, to dozens of customers. A bad search negates the point of a self-serve help-center. Please advise. 


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Paolo

Zendesk Engineering

Hi Rachel,
 
You can add labels to your articles to improve the search relevance. This article will provide the guide on how to implement it: Using labels on your help center articles. I highly recommend check the best practices part as well.
 
For more information about what influences search results in the help center, see About help center end user search.
 
Best,
Paolo | Technical Support Engineer | Zendesk

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Hi all, can someone from Zendesl please confirm what were the last updates in the article?

Was the table below changed?

We are receiving complaints about the search results for articles in the Zendesk Guide, the results recently are not sorted like they used to be.

Sometimes articles without labels are put in front of the articles with labels after we search by the specific words.

 

 

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We'd like to add an Internal Only section to some of the Articles but, currently, anything in that section of the article will also be indexed. 

 

Would be nice if there was a way of specify that certain text should not be indexed by Zendesk. Failing that, maybe another field on the article form that's not indexed by Zendesk. 

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As in the comment above, I also noticed as if the logic has changed. Like, labels for instance, don't seem to play such a huge role anymore. Whilst the length of the title seems to contribute the most!
Can you maybe double-check and update the scores?

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Hi, 

Someone here mentionned it is possible to use labels in order to backlist an article so it doesn't appear in the search results. 
In our knowledge base we have articles that are still availble and readable but are about a decomissionned feature. Therefore I would like for these not to show up directly on search. 
 

Does anyone know what kind of label I can use for this ? Or any other way to do this ?

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I spent some time working through the limitations of labels and, although not the most elegant solution, I found a method that works well. I’m sharing it here for others who may be facing similar issues.

The approach involves manually boosting the search ranking by adding hidden, repetitive sentences to the document. For example, if you want a page to rank higher when searching for the term “scan depth,” you can add the following hidden sentence multiple times at the end of the source code.

 

<p>
  <span hidden="hidden">The scan depth can be adjusted as follows according to the scanner type:</span>
  <span hidden="hidden">The scan depth can be adjusted as follows according to the scanner type:</span>
  <!-- Repeat this sentence about 30 times -->
</p>

After adding this hidden sentence about 30 times, the page consistently appeared at the top of search results for “scan depth.”   

Hope Zendesk provides a more elegant solution in the future. 

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I'm curious if the current table ranking and scores it correct. I read in the Understanding help center search methods article that the Instant search, which is the default search method, does not search body text or labels of articles. See snippet below. 

 

So do labels help and get ranked in the user searches, yes or no?

 

Instant search:

  • Uses a partial word search
  • Includes article titles only, not body text or labels of articles
  • Does not include community posts

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Jennifer Rowe

Zendesk Documentation Team

Hi Summer Polacek,

Instant search is the search method used only while the user is typing in the search box. That search method uses titles only, not body text or labels.

 

As soon as a user types a search term and presses Return/Enter, then native Help Center search is used. That search method includes titles, body text, and labels.

 

 

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