In my understanding, you have to prefix all your keywords with "+" for all of them to be necessary for a page to be included in your results. This makes the behavior slightly closer to Google.
Ask HN: Why is Confluence Wiki Search so bad?
61–70 of 127 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why is Confluence Wiki Search so bad?
#62I'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.
I tried their hosted version for a bit on their 30-day trial or whatever.
Virtually every page load took upwards of 5 seconds.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Confluence Wiki Search so bad?
#63Compared to jira search Confluence search is quite good.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Confluence Wiki Search so bad?
#64I use BitBucket, because it's free and I've been using it for a long time. Maybe GitHub is faster, but I don't access BitBucket enough to justify migrating ~50 repos I have. Can't be bothered. Its UI/UX? meh. I got used to it.
I use Confluence and Jira because, again, we use them at work. So I guess I'm using them because I have to. I also understand it's a pain to move our company from one to another (oh we've had discussions to move to Coda and others) but again, I'm not taking on that project. Again, UI/UX, search - all meh - they are working and I got used to it.
The inconvenience of using them does not justify the amount of time I need to spend to overcome my inconvenience. Some things, you just have to let them slide.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Confluence Wiki Search so bad?
#65Let's stop asking "why closed feature in closed product works so bad?" type of questions. The only appropriate answer is: because costumers continue to use it.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Confluence Wiki Search so bad?
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 s…
Well it depends of what you are talking about. Usually people who produce contents are power users. But people who search content as you said are the 95% of others users, these are the ones who also needs a search relevant to them.
My belief is that knowledge management can't exist without power users, which we call "admins", these are the ones responsible to make sure content is well organized for others and create content if necessary. Those people need specific tools to do their job well, which to me is more something that you can have in an admin interface while all the users use the basic interface.
Those tools have two sets of users, admins (curators, creators, organizers) and regular users. We need a different interface for both. And that's exactly what we are working on.
> 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?
That's exactly why I suggested to have multi titles, when you get that and you facilitate the suggestion of new titles for a document, anyone when finding a document can suggest the query terms he used, and that can benefit others users
Re: Ask HN: Why is Confluence Wiki Search so bad?
#67I'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.
They are garbage for developers but managers love it. Guess who decides in the end?
Re: Ask HN: Why is Confluence Wiki Search so bad?
#68We 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 a…
> the market does not provide worthy alternatives.
MediaWiki?
Re: Ask HN: Why is Confluence Wiki Search so bad?
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Bitbucket Cloud and Bitbucket On-prem are two entirely separate products. It makes about as much sense as you can expect from Atlassian. The former was a Mercurial thing that they purchased then later removed Mercurial support. The latter used to be called Stash.
We moved from Bitbucket On-prem to Gitlab and I must admit I do miss parts of Bitbucket's UI. It was much easier to find reviews you needed to do and it was much clearer when reviewers had finished reviewing and if work needed to be done. Gitlab should just copy this stuff.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Confluence Wiki Search so bad?
#70The 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…
It seems to me that the big problem with Confluence search (once you have a lot of pages) is that the results have poor relevance ranking. Wouldn't tossing the content into SQLite have the same problem?