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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?

#51

Post by 0xffff2 »

chrisseaton wrote: post #49
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.

Atlassian products feel like raw database frontends. I feel like each screen in each Atlassian product is always exactly a database table, being presented to me as an auto-generated form. Might as well use SQL directly.

The truly impressive feat (of Jira in particular, but also all of Atlassian's products in general) is how incredibly slow they are. I assume each page somehow touches every single row of every single table in the database because I don't know what else it could be doing to make page loads take so long.

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

#52

Post by MegaDeKay »

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.

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 of Mediawiki. And the hooks Confluence has in to Jira is something you don't get with plain Mediawiki, and that has real use for us.

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

#53

Post by dmpanch »

We are using Confluence for public and internal wiki, it has a bad search and really slow, but no matter how much everyone hates it, the market does not provide worthy alternatives.

When choosing 3 years ago, we used the following criteria:

* WYSIWYG editor. Any user must have a minimum effort to write documentation

* Flexible access permissions to various parts of the documentation. Public documentation is open to anonymous users, the internal one is divided into many sections with access for certain groups

* Multilingual support. Not out of the box, but possible with plugins

* Multilingual pdf export. In some markets, some customers prefer to have exported manuals

* The ability to inherit articles. We need to be able to make edits once, instead of duplicating the same articles

* Have a relatively modern appearance. Wiki engines are familiar to many because the whole world uses Wikipedia, but this does not make them more pleasing to the eyes, if I can say so

3 years have passed, I periodically look at alternatives, so far only wiki.js seems like a good solution but it’s not even close yet.

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

#54

Post by kvathupo »

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.

+1, Bitbucket search often returns results from older versions of a repo. Wouldn't be an issue if syncing to the current master didn't take a few days...

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

#55

Post by dragosbulugean »

polote wrote: post #46
oconnore wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Knowledge management is still a neglected area in most of companies. No money => a few players. Confluence has been there for years with almost no competition. Notion has emerged recently but is not really a good fit for medium to large companies. As a result Confluence is not worried and doesn't have to improve its product. Power users are a small share of users of knowledge management software, so it is difficult t…

We're also trying to build something in the space with www.archbee.io, a YC company.

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

#56

Post by cosmotic »

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.

We use bitbucket cloud, and the PR UX is awful. Which version are you using? Are you using a browser extension or something? Compared to UpSource or GitHub, Bitbucket PRs are very rough.

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

#57

Post by PaulHoule »

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.

I have seen self-hosted Jira installs that took 20+ sec to load a page.

Today I use one that they host and there is nothing wrong with it.

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

#58

Post by oconnore »

polote wrote: post #46
oconnore wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Knowledge management is still a neglected area in most of companies. No money => a few players. Confluence has been there for years with almost no competition. Notion has emerged recently but is not really a good fit for medium to large companies. As a result Confluence is not worried and doesn't have to improve its product. Power users are a small share of users of knowledge management software, so it is difficult t…

> Power users are a small share of users of knowledge management software, so it is difficult to build a system only for them

In practice, knowledge management at companies is a specialization. There are If you're not building tools for those power users, you're not building for creating and organizing content in your system at all.

As an example of how nuts this is, managers at my company regularly try out various search terms, create index documents, and do "internal SEO" to optimize how other employees will discover documents. This isn't a byzantine environment like public web search is, why do I have to hack around the wiki's default notion of page relevance?

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

#59

Post by nicoburns »

PaulHoule wrote: post #57
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.

I have seen self-hosted Jira installs that took 20+ sec to load a page. Today I use one that they host and there is nothing wrong with it.

We used the hosted version. It would lag on the order of seconds while trying to type in the issue description box. We switched to another issue management software.

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

#60

Post by dangoor »

I agree. This is why I've tried to make use of Confluence's other tools to make content findable and also improve search…

1. give pages labels. This lets you insert a label-based index, and also makes it possible to narrow search by label

2. use spaces. Separate the content into spaces based on who is likeliest to need that information. You can narrow search by space, and put a search box on the page in the space.

3. use the hierarchy. You have to put the pages somewhere in the hierarchy anyway, so try to make it reasonable.

4. Make useful index pages. Obviously, this doesn't scale, but if you can provide people with useful starting points, it will help them. For example, at Khan Academy we have a space for the whole org with a front page to get you to every team's front page. The engineering team has a front page with a small collection of useful & commonly-used links

5. if you have a page in your hierarchy with a lot of content underneath it, add a search box on that page that constrains the search to that set of pages.

The biggest problem Confluence search has is that it's terrible with relevance, and using its tools to narrow down the search can improve the relevance of the results considerably.

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