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Ask HN: Why is Confluence Wiki Search so bad?

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Re: Ask HN: Why is Confluence Wiki Search so bad?

#101

Post by nicktorba »

simonw wrote: post #10

The good news here is that the Confluence API is actually really good, and very easy to integrate with. I wrote a custom search engine that worked by running on cron, pulling in all of the content from Confluence and writing it into a SQLite table with SQLite full-text search enabled (using https://sqlite-utils.datasette.io/en/stable/python-api.html#... ), then sticking a https://datasette.io/ interface in front of i…

Have you shared the code or any more details for that custom search engine anywhere? I'd love to see how you did that. I'm considering doing the same thing soon

Re: Ask HN: Why is Confluence Wiki Search so bad?

#102

Post by speedgoose »

jschumacher wrote: post #81
rdw wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Atlassian bought Bitbucket after it was already mature. That's why!

Not quite. Bitbucket was acquired in 2011, only supported Mercurial and was missing a lot of features, including the pull request available today.

Perhaps they didn't fire the whole bitbucket team after buying them, so the people were still able to produce good software for a short time.

Re: Ask HN: Why is Confluence Wiki Search so bad?

#104

Post by aaron695 »

jfrunyon wrote: post #79
MegaDeKay wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We started with a self-hosted mediawiki server and this did not go well. Expecting someone not very computer savvy (and there are lots of those in my company) to dive into the markup on a page and not make a mess of it was a bad idea. At that time at least the WSIWYG editor was not very usable. Don't know if that is still the case. So off we went to Atlassian. It has many flaws, but nobody is pining for the old days…

You can literally go see for yourself how the WYSIWYG editor works these days. I suspect it's come a long way since the last time you checked it. My bigger question though is why the average user is important. Most large companies have employees whose entire job is ... knowledge management. If they can't figure out how to write wikitext then maybe they're not a good fit for the role?

> If they can't figure out how to write wikitext then maybe they're not a good fit for the role?

This is absolutely wrong.

It is correct for Wikipedia. Because you don't want idiots aka Twitter users in there.

For almost any other wiki it's hard to get anyone to give a fuck to actually enter data and harder still to update data.

Even in imaginary company's who pay people to 'Wiki', other than why you want to add to things for them to 'work out', any shit they do will be corporate crap everyone knows.

It's the long tail on those big companies you want on your wiki.

Re: Ask HN: Why is Confluence Wiki Search so bad?

#106

Post by ivan_gammel »

jfrunyon wrote: post #74
ivan_gammel wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In corporate environment paying for Confluence Cloud subscription can be cheaper than having even a part time admin to install and maintain self-hosted solution (proper security, backups, handling compatibility issues on updates etc etc). It may not be the best solution, but it is good enough.

In corporate environment how do you not already have an admin who can handle this just like they handle any of your other self-hosted needs? I've never worked for a single company that didn't have something hosted internally.

Regardless of whether a company has an admin with necessary qualifications or not, their time is not free and can be used elsewhere.

In the company where I work we do not have anything but network equipment in the server room (500 employees distributed across Europe). All „self-hosted“ solutions are on AWS instances behind VPN, and there are only four 3rd party systems of this kind, where investment in self-hosted setup did make sense at some point (two of them will be replaced with commercial SaaS soon). We of course have a devops team capable of maintaining those systems, but this is not given that it worth it.

When talking about „self-hosted“ solutions it is important to consider all factors that contribute to TCO. It is not as simple as getting some hardware and running an installer.

Re: Ask HN: Why is Confluence Wiki Search so bad?

#107

Post by ivan_gammel »

jfrunyon wrote: post #72
rablackburn wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this is a serious question, this is why: Confluence users are enterprise companies, and getting a self-hosted server up and running is too much pain to be bothered to deal with. This is a process problem. The steps to get one would be something like: - try and find the “provision a server” option in the corporate service portal (there probably isn’t one) - ask someone if they know how to provision one. Get a link…

> getting a self-hosted server up and running is too much pain And yet many of them self-host Confluence. And many other things. And provision servers all the time. And you have to provide a CC (or maybe PO) for Confluence in any case. And you can't just associate Confluence with a cost centre. And you have to budget it. And... literally every single one of your arguments applies just as much to Confuence.

Self-hosted Confluence Server edition is a legacy of the times when cloud SaaS was not an option. Now you cannot even buy it, because it is being replaced with DataCenter edition.

Re: Ask HN: Why is Confluence Wiki Search so bad?

#108

Post by joshxyz »

VWWHFSfQ wrote: post #22

I'm my experience almost everything that Atlassian makes is total garbage. Bitbucket, Jira, Confluence, etc. are all horribly slow to the point of being unusable and most of it has very poor UI/UX. I pretty much don't recommend anything they make. It's not surprising at all that a fundamental feature of a wiki, search , doesn't work very well.

Hey even Trello got ruined, lol. Fucking Atlassian, feature overload.

Re: Ask HN: Why is Confluence Wiki Search so bad?

#109

Post by jstummbillig »

jsjohnst wrote: post #39
jstummbillig wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gmail produces by far the best search results for me (comparing to apple mail and thunderbird) and makes me reach for it regularly for search alone, which I find pretty annoying. If there is anything better out there I am all ears.

> If there is anything better out there I am all ears. Mutt, Pine, grep, awk, etc. I don't understand why throwing a GUI interface on top automatically seems to make email search absolutely awful, this includes Gmail. I so often need to find a specific old email using a hazy match criteria that I am half tempted to pipe my email into Splunk (I run a small Splunk cluster at home for other needs) and use it (as then I…

I too need to find specific old email. For that, I type what comes to mind into the gmail search box.

To each their own.

Re: Ask HN: Why is Confluence Wiki Search so bad?

#110

Post by kwertyoowiyop »

jschumacher wrote: post #93
abeppu wrote: post #76

I'll take a stab at actually guessing why aside from the issue that people making purchasing decisions don't see how bad it is until work has already gone into bringing in docs and pushing people to use it. Aside from the organizational issues, I think there's a problem where basically no search system can be good for every org with any kind of internal info and different queries from perhaps several distinct types o…

Great take. I worked on Confluence for a few years and have a bit of insight. Search has been an area of focus on and off for the most part of the last 15 years. It actually has gotten a lot better and Atlassian has an entire team focused on improving the search experience across their suite of products (they started with Confluence). And from what I hear, they are focusing on all the right things. To your point, no…

It may be depressing to be on the Confluence “search” team. But wouldn’t it be MORE depressing to be on their “editing” team? Or how about their “performance” team? :-(
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