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New Clibu Knowledge Base Release - Install and run it on your own PC
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Posted by Neville Franks
May 14, 2016 at 09:27 AM
Hi Bill,
I don’t think I’d considered search within tags and it hadn’t been suggested before, however I can certainly see the use case and technically it isn’t a problem.
However I need to think about the way the user would actually accomplish this. Would you expect that if the ‘tags filter’ was in use and you did a search, it would only search within the tags filter results.
The problem I see with that is if you want to search all articles you’d need to set the ‘tags filter’ accordingly first which a) is an extra step, b) could be confusing as folks might not get the results they expect because the ‘tags filter’ is in use. (I’m thinking aloud here).
Posted by Neville Franks
May 14, 2016 at 09:30 AM
Hi Bill,
The full text search in Clibu does use stemming etc. however the current implementation leaves a bit to be desired. My plan is to replace the current search engine with a better one to address the current shortcomings.
MadaboutDana wrote:
Argh! I’ve just come across another problematic issue. As it stands,
>Clibu only finds full words – it doesn’t find parts of words (so
>it won’t find the “sand” in “sandwich”, for example). Is that the case,
>or should I be using specific syntax? (An asterisk doesn’t work,
>unfortunately).
Posted by MadaboutDana
May 16, 2016 at 11:31 AM
Yo Neville,
I suppose I’d expect there to be some kind of “search within search” function - either by being able to apply a tag filter to an existing set of search results or being able to search within an existing set of filtered tags. As I see it, that shouldn’t really be more than a two-click experience, e.g.
first select your tags…
then (perhaps through a drop-down option in the search box specifying e.g. ‘search within tag filter’?) type in your specific term/phrase and click ‘Find’
or
first do your search for a term/phrase
then (again, using a drop-down option the tag filter box, e.g. ‘apply filter to search results’) specify your constraining filter
The drop-down option for search/filter functions is a relatively user-friendly way of doing this (you’ll find it in all sorts of apps and web apps, usually in the form of a magnifying glass with a dropdown arrow alongside it), and I suspect adds minimal programming overhead.
As for stemming/word parts: this is a tricky function. I think that ultimately, you need a very powerful full-text search engine at the core of the app, so that even if the right set of stemming variants can’t be found (e.g. because it’s an unusual language), at least the full-text search can spot partial strings. I know this is a demanding requirement, for a variety of sound technical reasons (how do you index arbitrary strings?), but engines such as Lucene appear to have got the wherewithal to handle it. But I can’t pretend to be an expert in this field. Only a fussy user!
Cheers,
Bill
Posted by Neville Franks
May 20, 2016 at 08:15 AM
Hi Bill, yes that all sounds reasonable.
One thing I do need to add to the Search widget is a drop down history list so that you can easilly repeat previous searches. Search also needs a way to clear the current search and revert to showing al articles, possibly via a [x] close button. And it needs a way to search across multiple knowledge bases.
So the user interface for searching within tags and applying tags filters within search needs to also take the above into account.
I’ve also been wondering whether there is some way to combine search + tags filter into a single widget, but now with your enhancements I feel the current arrangement is necessary.
Yes search with stemming etc, is difficult. That said I’m confident that what’s there now can be replaced and improved quite a bit.
Neville