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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?

#71

Post by pornel »

nitwit005 wrote: post #30

I don't think it's unusually bad. Rather, if an app offers open ended search, it will generally generate fairly poor results.

No, it really is exceptionally bad even among half-assed search implementations.

For a start, it interprets multiple words in a query as an OR. You search for a "hello world", you get "hello nobody" and "goodbye world" and the search results.

It also always applies stemming, which mangles technical terms. At Cloudflare we have a daemon called "cloudflared" and it's impossible to find it in the damn wiki.

If it even tries to do any prioritization, it's indistinguishable from random. I search for a project's name, I get fragment of meeting notes from 7 years ago, not the project's homepage.

And the UI is unusably awful too. The fancy-ajaxy JS overlay breaks the Back button, so if you click on an irrelevant result (and all of them are irrelevant), pressing back doesn't go back to search results, but instead makes you lose document you were on.

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

#72

Post by jfrunyon »

rablackburn wrote: post #44
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.

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.

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

#74

Post by jfrunyon »

ivan_gammel wrote: post #36
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.

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.

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

#75

Post by josephcsible »

marcodiego wrote: post #65

Let'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.

> costumers continue to use it

The people who make the decision to buy Confluence aren't the ones who have to use it.

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

#76

Post by abeppu »

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 of users with different goals. To get good, a system needs to improve through at least rudimentary ML. At its simplest, if Alice searches for X today and clicks doc3, if Bob searches for X tomorrow, doc3 should rank higher. This requires collecting and aggregating click stream data, and using this count info (with cardinality #docs x #queries) at search time. But sometimes it requires a richer model relating search terms to terms in relevant (clicked) docs and optimizing for some measure of search quality (NDCG) etc. All of this requires detailed access to docs, search/click histories, and a fair amount of computation and storage. But customers have legit reasons for wanting these docs to only be accessible by their own employees. And they don't want to dedicate their own staff to improving such a system. No one wants to hear that their model retaining ran out of memory, etc. So shipping a simple system which doesn't improve but doesn't have moving parts becomes a local optima.

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

#77

Post by jfrunyon »

jacquesm wrote: post #3

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

I usually have better luck with the "autocomplete" results in gmail search than with the actual search results. I don't even know how you manage to screw up your core competency that badly.

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

#78

Post by ironmagma »

0xffff2 wrote: post #51
chrisseaton wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It’s artificially slow to get you to upgrade. Wish I was joking. Thankfully my company uses Clubhouse/Shortcut which is orders of magnitude better.

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

#79

Post by jfrunyon »

MegaDeKay wrote: post #52
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…

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?

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

#80

Post by FreezerburnV »

omgtehlion wrote: post #42
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.

Well, they bought Trello and ruined it too :(

What’s wrong with Trello? It still seems to run fast? And has some new stuff added that seems to be useful? Dunno, still seems to be fine to me.
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