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45 Comments

  • Nicky Clark

    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. 

    3
  • Chantal Marti

    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!

    2
  • Jarl Frode Arntzen

    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.

    2
  • Jeff S.

    Hi,

    I have the same question as a user from a year ago. I would like to remove Community posts from the default Search behavior in the Copenhagen theme we use. Our Community content is not a robust or directed as our Help Center content and can just include a lot of 'chatter' among our users.

    I have tried all variations of 'Scoped Search' in the options to no avail. Is it possible via Search helpers? 

    Failing that, can we automatically select Guide content on the search results page and not 'all categories' which requires a user to select out of Community content?

    Thanks.

    1
  • Meghan

    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? 

    1
  • Kyle Johnson

    We've had issues with our users (and even myself) getting completely different search results when we first hit the "search" button, compared to if you just click the "search" button a second time. The first list of results actually don't have anything relevant to what was searched for. Very strange and it's causing a dramatic decrease in the confidence of our users when trying to find the information they need. 

    Example:

    I search "Field Day" to get to one of the dozens of articles that have this right in the title of the article. These are the results I got the first time:

    (Nothing titled "Field Day", and only 27 results)

    Then I simply click the Search button again (not even changing any of the text), and I get this completely different set of search results, which is actually the correct set of results:

    (149 results, and everything is titled Field Day)

    1
  • Davis Lundberg

    Looking for code help to add another filter criteria to the side bar on the "Search Results Page"

    This way it will list sub selections such as Labels instead of just By Category/products. 

     

    1
  • Jarl Frode Arntzen

    Hi, Zendesk.

    We now have close to 200 different help articles for various parts of our appilcation. It has recently become more and more difficult to find the correct article and it took us a while to realize that adding more words to the search term does not narrow the search results.

    In our system searching for bank yields 6 results while searching for bank account yields 64 (!) results. As we're only half way through documenting our system, this problem will only increase.

    Is there a way to switch on the "find multiple words" search variant as default?

    Thanks.

    1
  • Jennifer Rowe
    Zendesk Documentation Team

    Hi Nikki, thanks for pointing that out!

    The typo is that there is no typo and there should be. It was originally written as "user segmemt" to show that despite the typo, the search engine displays the correct results for "user segment," but someone corrected the typo, so it didn't make any sense. I've fixed it! Thanks!

    1
  • Patrick Morgan

    Just to clarify the following section:

    These items are not included in the search...

    • Headings - Any text with a heading format applied to it does not appear in Help Center search.

    Is this saying that the snippet shown in search won't include content in Headings? Presumably the search does crawl and index Headings, correct?

    I'm thinking specifically in an FAQ page use case where you might have a number of FAQs collected on a single page (each using a Heading on the page) rather than split across multiple articles. This would improve the user's browsing experience in finding answers about a specific product/feature/etc... they'd just go the that page to find an answer from the various FAQ. When related FAQs get their own articles, it increases the amount of clicking and browsing a user has to do. Surfacing Heading content in those snippets could help indicate that an answer appears in an article, even if their question isn't in the Title.

    Additionally, I'm curious to know why Headings are not given any special weight in Help Center search. When optimizing for Google (which we also want to do with our help center), Headers are really important to indicate what the page is about and to help Google determine relevance and fulfill search intent.

    1
  • 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}}--}}

     

    1
  • Liam Jones

    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

    1
  • mee mmt

    I want to display few articles by default when search result is zero. Is there any way to achieve that?

    0
  • Nikki

    Zach Brown I don't know if you'll like this suggestion, but the first idea that came to my mind was to use labels to make the later articles blacklisted to never show. Then your first articles will be the ones to come up. It just depends if there are ever cases where your later articles will have matches and you want them to be returned even if the first articles are not.

     

    Also Jennifer Rowe , either my brain is missing something or this sentence has a typo:

    For example, if you search for “user segment” the search engine will also return results containing “user segment”.

    0
  • Dave Dyson
    Hi John -
     
    You can hide this link by editing the your theme code, adding the following to the bottom of style.css:
     
    /* hide the help center brand link in the search result items breadcrumbs */
    .search-result-breadcrumbs > li:first-child{display:none};
     
    For more information, see Customizing the CSS or JavaScript
     
    This won't hide the '>' between the brand name link and the category; I'm not sure how to do that, but maybe someone in the community might have an idea, if you want to pursue that as well.
    0
  • matthew newman

    Hello, I hope you can help with a question we have on how to make sure one search result appears above a second search result. Please see screenshot below. We want to reverse the order of the two responses shown in the screenshot. We want the Zendesk response about US leaves (see red arrow) to appear before the leavesresponse excluding the US. Based on the relevance score factors, would it be most effective to change the knowledge article title for the US response to say "Leave of absence for United States employees" to create a stronger link when users type in "Leave of absence"? Should we add more labels in the US article to include the term "Leave of absence"? Should we add article votes to boost the relevance? It is important that US article comes before OUS article because the leave policies are different for each group. We need to include both knowledge articles in the search, but we really want US to appear first in search results. Thanks for any suggestions you can provide.

    0
  • Gustavo Oliveira
    Zendesk Customer Care
    Hi Kyle,
     
    I've reached out to you through a private ticket, so we can further investigate it.
    0
  • Laura Mayer-Sommer

    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?

    0
  • Kyle Johnson

    Xin we experienced something similar where users were treating our search bar like Google and typing full sentences and sometimes paragraphs, which made the search results pretty useless. One thing we did was change the prompted text in the search bar from something like "How can we help?" to "Keyword search" to guide them in how we want them to perform their search. Idk if that would help in your context but it seems to have changed the kind of searches our users make.

    0
  • Dane
    Zendesk Engineering

    Jeff S.

    Due to the nature of your concern, I have created a ticket for you. Please wait for an update via email from one of our Support Advocate.

    0
  • John DiGregorio

    Hello,

    We are in the process of consolidating two brands into one.  However, some customers still refer to their previous brand.   On the knowledge search is there a way to remove the name from the subsection - please see image below

     

    0
  • Alex Ruano

    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?

    0
  • Dave Dyson

    Hi Karolina,

    Not directly, but you can use the Help Center API to get search results in JSON format: Help Center API – Search

    0
  • Soo Hian Foo

    Hi, can we only set the search to find Help Center articles and not community topics/posts?

    Is there a setting for this? Thank you!

    0
  • Rahul Singh

    Hi, 

    Is there a way to configure null search default text? currently there's a 'contact us' redirection for a null search result, which I want to remove.

    0
  • Xin

    We have close to 2500 articles on help center. We found that we keep getting "wrong words" being triggered in the search. For example, a query from Answer Bot:

    "Some of my users are having problem with schedules. Since Monday morning, I have a lot of failed schedules, expecially for two users, with no error messages. What could we do"

    The returned articles are completely irrelevant to "schedule", instead these are the words seems to be used for ranking the search:

    • with
    • of
    • are
    • users
    • schedule
    • Monday morning

    We have labeled most of our articles. How can we avoid having "with", "of" and "are" such words getting involved in the search rank?

    0
  • Hannah Lucid

    Hello,

    Is there a way to turn off the Article Voting?

    0
  • Zach Brown

    Thanks Nikki! I didn't realize labels could be used to prevent articles from showing up on search. I'll take it under consideration.

    0
  • Xin

    Kyle Johnson Gotcha, thanks so much!

    0
  • Eric Nelson
    Zendesk Developer Advocacy
    Hey Davis,

    This can be found in our templating cookbook.

    Thanks!
    0

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