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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?

#31

Post by walrus01 »

noja wrote: post #24
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.

That's what everyone has said about every piece of enterprise software ever.

wait until you see medical enterprise software or defense industry enterprise software

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

#32

Post by walrus01 »

I don't understand why people use confluence.

I can gain far more functionality with a properly implemented self-hosted mediawiki server (the same code that runs wikipedia itself) with a number of useful plugins installed and enabled.

It doesn't require a rocket science level of apache2+php7+mariadb knowledge to set up. The instructions are really quite straightforward.

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

#33

Post by acdha »

noja wrote: post #24
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.

That's what everyone has said about every piece of enterprise software ever.

It happens any time the buyer isn’t the user. Atlassian products are terrible because some manager buys them and tells everyone they have to use it, and if the engineers complain they’ll probably just blow it off as “they’re too demanding” or “they don’t want to do Agile right”.

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

#34

Post by hotpxl »

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.

So true. The way Atlassian hijacks browser keyboard hotkeys in Jira/Confluence/Bitbucket is purely infuriating.

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

#35

Post by sethammons »

CPLX wrote: post #16

This thread is well timed, I was just about to pick a wiki solution and was leaning towards confluence. But search is really important to me. What’s the prevailing wisdom these days on the best solution for an internal knowledge base/wiki platform?

As for an ok way to manage internal knowledge, I've yet to see it. I've wanted to try out the Johnny Decimal System because if you can create a solid hierarchy of a filing system, everyone should be able to drill down to the right doc. Confluence search doesn't work. Neither does google docs. I think I now want the ability to just pull a local copy of a section of docs, say "all engineering," and just use grep locally.

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

#36

Post by ivan_gammel »

walrus01 wrote: post #32

I don't understand why people use confluence. I can gain far more functionality with a properly implemented self-hosted mediawiki server (the same code that runs wikipedia itself) with a number of useful plugins installed and enabled. It doesn't require a rocket science level of apache2+php7+mariadb knowledge to set up. The instructions are really quite straightforward.

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.

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

#37

Post by polote »

Searching corporate wiki is pretty difficult, because contrary to something like Google, you can't use context of a search query to recommend content.

* First you have a few occurrence of the same search query in your search history (because only a few people searched similar words in the past)

* You can't either use synonyms of remove stop words to recommend better content (IT, can means "information technology, or the pronoun. THE can be an acronym, ...).

So basically the only thing you can do is search words. Confluence is worse than that because it tries to remove stop words and do things that break exact match search. But this is a difficult job. Ways to improve search: allow multi titles, index with tags, attributes, only do exact words match, allow users to suggest content for a specific search query, search autocompletion, searching in live during typing ... (many things that Confluence doesn't care about). You also have to respect rights when returning documents, each documents, can have rights from folder or document itself, inherited from team access or user access, so this is really computation intensive too, or pre-compute rights

(Working on a competitor [0] of Confluence and I have put plenty of hours of work on that specific issue, and I can tell you this is really hard)

[0] https://dokkument.com

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

#38

Post by sam_lowry_ »

CodeAndCuffs wrote: post #27
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.

IMO bitbucket is okay. Its UX for PRs is amazing, 1000x better than Githubs. Especially its side by side diff. This concludes, and fully encompasses, everything good that I have to say about Atlassian products.

Try to use Intellij's Github plugin. It does wonders.

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

#39

Post by jsjohnst »

jstummbillig wrote: post #8
jacquesm wrote: post #3

Try gmail. More than a decade on and still no partial word match.

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 don't need a local copy of every email on all devices or to need to SSH into a central box to do a TUI based search)

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

#40

Post by oconnore »

polote wrote: post #37

Searching corporate wiki is pretty difficult, because contrary to something like Google, you can't use context of a search query to recommend content. * First you have a few occurrence of the same search query in your search history (because only a few people searched similar words in the past) * You can't either use synonyms of remove stop words to recommend better content (IT, can means "information technology, or…

It seems like there ought to be some recognition that these are business tools, and ought to be designed with power users in mind. Instead, "search" in B2B products is built with the same uber-minimalist UX as B2C search.

Even early Google had more power user features than a typical B2B product search bar.

Boolean expressions (NOT, OR, AND), exact match strings, links-to, linked-from, in-folder/category, etc. should be mandatory for these workflows. Better if you can include search queries as live page content, as in Notion & Height.

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